Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī's Four Levels of Eating

Everyone eats to live, though some, it is said, live to eat, and the discussion of eating begins with the first of these: eating in order to stay alive. Islam sorts permissible eating into a clear set of categories — sometimes farḍ, sometimes wājib, sometimes mustaḥabb, sometimes simply mubāḥ, permissible, and sometimes ḥarām. Imam Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, one of the greatest mufassirūn of Islam, sets these out in his tafsīr at exactly the verse commanding believers to eat ḥalāl food, explaining precisely when eating is permissible and when it is not.

Nothing in a Muslim's life falls outside this law: every action is classed as farḍ, wājib, sunnah, ḥarām, makrūh, mustaḥabb or mubāḥ — the afʿāl al-mukallafīn, the doings of a person legally accountable, sane and past puberty, ʿāqil and bāligh. Farḍ itself divides into two: farḍ ʿayn, which every single person must perform without exception — the five daily prayers, from puberty until death, are the clearest example — and farḍ kifāyah, a communal obligation discharged on behalf of the whole community once enough of its members carry it out. The funeral prayer is the standard case: once a group of Muslims comes together to wash the body, pray over it and bury it, the responsibility lifts from everyone else; but where no one performs it, and a Muslim body is left for others outside the community to handle, the whole community is held responsible for it on the Day of Judgement. Farḍ, in this sense, means simply compulsory, and the distinction matters: on the Ḥanafī reckoning, denying or rejecting a farḍ makes a person a kāfir, a disbeliever, while denying or rejecting a wājib — a real but lesser degree of obligation — makes a person a fāsiq, openly disobedient, without removing him from Islam.

First, he says, there is an amount of food that must be consumed, which is farḍ: enough food or drink to avoid dying, to avoid perishing. There is no such thing in Islam as fasting or dieting to the point of death — it is impossible, not permitted, to starve oneself to death — anorexia, or whatever else it might be called, that some of the sisters go through now and then, is not permitted either. So much is this the case that if a person is about to die — not by their own choice, but because someone has locked them up and is withholding all food and drink, and the only food placed before them is pork, ḥarām — it becomes farḍ to eat that ḥarām pork, which becomes ḥalāl for as long as the danger lasts, enough to stay alive. Not "bring me another roast, I like that one, give me another" — that is not what is meant. Just enough, a morsel or two, to remain alive: that much is permissible, and indeed farḍ, to do. Refusing it — dying, as a result, within minutes — is suicide, and suicide is entirely ḥarām in Islam. So it is farḍ, compulsory, upon a person to eat sufficient nourishment to keep alive, to sustain the life-force within; dying of starvation by choice is self-killing.

Second, the wājib amount of food: sufficient food and drink to sustain one's life. Where the first level is about avoiding death outright, this is a step above it — a minimal level. There is the account of scholars who kept to remarkably little: one egg a day was enough for some, a meal every three days for others, with no great love of food and no wish to be forever visiting the toilet — food itself is, if anything, more often loved to excess than the reverse, a weakness common enough even among those who teach against it. Some of the great scholars trained their bodies to this minimum until it caused them no sickness, eating only enough to keep the strength needed for worship, for standing properly in ṣalāh, and to stay alert — for the first effect of eating too much is drowsiness, a pull toward lying down, as anyone who has felt it after a heavy meal knows well enough. But to eat enough to sustain life is wājib to do.