Lashing out against the so-called cross-contamination that occurs when eateries prepare their meals, Norwegian Muslims have found unexpected partners in vegans, who also oppose the same routines for various kinds of foods.
The Halal Guide, a popular Facebook group with tens of thousands of members, has called for better routines for how halal and vegan food is prepared.
In a recent much-shared post, the group revealed that a number of fast food chains, including Burger King, make all their products on the same grill and in the same frying oil. That is to say, vegetarian burgers, chicken burgers, fish burgers and beef burgers all fry side by side.
The irritating have a way of finding one another.
Unlike other religions, declared the nineteenth-century French scholar Ernest Renan, Islam “was born in the full light of history.” Renan’s point, of course, was that whereas, for example, Jesus was unknown during his lifetime to the great world beyond Galilee and Judea, and the story of his life was set down, in various versions, only decades after his crucifixion, Muhammed was in his own lifetime a public figure of unparalleled eminence – the prophet of a new religion, the commander of an army that conquered much of the Arabian peninsula in the name of that religion, and the founder of an Islamic empire that, over the century or so after his death, would spread his religion from the western end of the Mediterranean to what is now India, and eventually threaten on more than one occasion to engulf the 
