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In the blue-walled Bronx premises of Saroop and Sons, Inc., ritual meat preparers in the Muslim tradition, a Dominican man and woman look at some goats in a pen.

The man explained that he wanted to cook a goat for his wife’s birthday but needed his mother, who was accompanying him, to help with the selection.

“I’m not religious,” the male customer said. “I just love goats.”

Saroop and Sons is representative of a kind of specialty house which deals in the halal tradition of ritual slaughter that is an important part of Muslim tradition.

In the 1970s in New York, halal butcher shops were so small in number “you could count them on one hand,” said Louis Abdellatif Cristillo, field director of a Columbia University research project on Muslim communities in New York. But now, he said, there are at least 30 halal meat preparation businesses in the city which are keeping pace with the growth of New York’s Muslim community. Where a mosque would spring up in the city, a halal shop would soon follow, he said.

But meat prepared in the Muslim ritual tradition also appears to have caught on with other immigrant groups. In fact, workers at Saroop and Sons estimate that 75 percent of their customers, mostly Latinos, are non-Muslims.

The halal tradition involves the recitation of special prayers at the time of slaughter and is analogous to the kosher tradition. It plays an important role in the Muslim diet, said Neguin Yavari, professor of Islam at Columbia University.

“It makes practicing Muslims happy to know it’s available,” said Yavari.

Standing outside the Saroop and Sons slaughter room, the office manager who identified himself only by his first name, Trini, leaned against a chair and described the differences between his religion and that of Christianity.

“Most Christians don’t really care where their food comes from. They just want to eat meat,” he said.

“But Muslim people believe in halal. Some people wouldn’t take meat if it wasn’t halal. That’s the way they eat it,” said Trini, who emigrated from Trinidad eight years ago.

For its Muslim clientele, the Bronx business largely serves the African Muslim population that lives nearby. Many of Saroop and Sons’ Muslim customers came from Senegal, Gambia and other West African countries, said Trini.

But on a recent morning, the first customers of the day were the Dominican couple.

After a particular goat was selected by the customers, an employee of Saroop and Sons went into a pen and inched closer to the animal that was to be slaughtered—a goat with a black coat that was in the midst of a crowd of sheep. The worker dragged the shrieking animal from the pen to a nearby slaughter room.

The ritual slaughter took place as the animal’s head lay in a metal cylindrical “killing cone.” The butcher muttered a prayer – “Bismillah Allah u Akbar” which means “In the name of God, God is great,” and with a knife in one hand and the animal’s head in the other performed the slaughter.

The goat’s carcass was cleaned and quickly carved up with an electric saw. The entire process, from selection of the goat to its departure from the building in wrapped pieces, took less than 15 minutes.

“They say when you do a sacrifice in life, you do good,” said Trini, who oversees the slaughter. “So the more sacrifice you do, the better. It all depends on your mind, what you feel and what you think.”

Sometimes, a butcher names an animal before he kills it, said Trini. “He performs a sort of baptism,” believing its spirit will live on in its name, he said.

While any Muslim can perform the slaughter, according to Trini, a specialized African Muslim from Gambia works best because of his connection to the clients who patronize the business.

“African Muslims believe strongly in Allah,” he said. “When they come and see their own people, they feel good. It helps business.”

But business has not been great lately. With the downturn in the economy following Sept. 11, Thanksgiving brought fewer sales than in previous years, and Trini said he worries Christmas sales will be similarly low. He suspects some people killed in the World Trade Center had been customers at Saroop and Sons, and others, still in mourning, aren’t spending money on meat like they used to.

However, Trini said he expects a boost in sales at the end of Ramadan in mid-December, when Muslims celebrate the completion of their month-long fast.