Eating in the Company of a Guest, and Eating to Excess

Third is mustaḥabb, the liked, as opposed to the disliked, makrūh. The liked amount of eating is to share in food and drink so as to keep a guest, a musāfir, company: someone arrives at the house, is offered food out of hospitality, and is too shy to eat alone, so the host sits and eats alongside him — and keeps eating, because if the host stops, the guest will stop too, out of the same shyness. His own teacher used to say that a person who eats alone, even a little too much, will be asked by Allah (swt) on the Day of Judgement why he ate so much; but a person who eats in the company of a Muslim guest, among good friends, eating together, will not be questioned about it even where a little more than usual was eaten. This is why Muslims are so given to piling food on a guest — eat, eat, more food, and more again, because the more that is eaten, the more reward, ḥasanāt, accrues to the host — and the more of a belly, "a balcony," the host builds in the process, besides the point. "That is all I can manage," a guest might protest — "the sunnah is to eat a third, a third, a third." "Not on this occasion," comes the reply, "eat, eat." The purpose is to keep a guest company: to graze a little at a time, so that if the host stops, the guest, out of shyness, feels he must stop too — and so the host keeps going, so that the guest keeps going. This, even where it tips into eating rather more than usual, is itself mustaḥabb.

Fourth is mubāḥ, the ordinary permissible amount: a reasonable, moderate intake of food and drink sufficient to maintain a healthy body. This particular rule does not seem to apply in Australia. There is the account of a doctor, a friend of his, who arrived from overseas skinny as a rake; seen again after seven years in the country, he had put on a great deal of weight, yet when a patient asked him whether his own weight was healthy, the doctor pronounced him perfectly fine — a man who was, on any reasonable reckoning, twenty-five or thirty kilograms overweight. Pressed on why he would call this healthy, the doctor explained that by Australian standards it was: nobody here was thin, everybody was obese to one degree or another, and he had simply given up expecting otherwise. The doctor himself, a hundred and seventy-two centimetres tall and properly no more than sixty-eight kilograms, weighed a hundred and ten. He had no interest in dieting or in exercise; his patients wanted reassurance, and reassurance was what he gave.