The Animal Within, and Its Two Extremes

Food matters this much because it is one of the basic requirements of a human being, and it is exactly what the nafs al-ammārah, the base, commanding self, thrives on. Among its wants — food, sleep, intimacy with a spouse, idle chatter — food comes first, and it is a strange kind of requirement, since it has no upper or lower limit: the more the nafs is fed, the more it wants, a bottomless pit. This is shahwat al-bāṭin, the inward appetite — a love of food, a love of the stomach itself — and every human being is born with it — even a newborn, unable yet to use its hands or arms for anything, whose only working faculty is the mouth, fastening at once onto the mother for milk and beginning immediately to feed, wanting to eat constantly, and screaming the moment there is no food to be had. It is something basic to human existence from the very start, and yet Islam regulates it: a person who fails to take care of their food at the mubāḥ level, to maintain a healthy body able to worship and to run a healthy life, goes overboard — into tafrīṭ or ifrāṭ, deficiency or excess. Tafrīṭ is the extreme of starving oneself to a skeleton and dying of it; the opposite extreme is obesity, eating so much that a person becomes, bluntly, a glutton — and gluttony is counted a major sin even within Christianity. Modern society, having handed the nafs al-ammārah complete control, moves ever further toward this second extreme: the more money available, the more food available, the more access to processed, ready-made food — an existence in which chocolate, chips and packaged food of every kind feel indispensable. The nafs constantly pushes toward eating; Islam brings the regulation.

Of the four levels, the first, the farḍ level, has probably never applied to anyone in this audience — nobody here is at war, held captive, enslaved, or otherwise being starved and tortured by an enemy. The second is roughly automatic, the level most people start from without thinking about it. The third, mustaḥabb, comes easily too — Muslims organise walīmahs and gatherings readily enough, going out with friends and doing plenty of makan makan, eating together without a second thought; Muslims are, if nothing else, accomplished eaters. But the fourth, the healthy level Islam actually promotes and asks for, is the one requiring real attention: anything beyond it is dangerous territory, no longer a balance. Some people have a naturally high metabolism and are lean and healthy regardless of what they eat; others' internal regulation is thoroughly disordered, taking in food faster than they realise, and the sentence any such person might use to describe it trails off before it is finished… And when that regulation is lost, because the nafs wants so much, the consequences follow — in this world, and in the ākhirah besides. What consequence in the ākhirah? Allah (swt) will ask: I gave you a body, an avatar, and the responsibility to look after it. Why did you abuse its health? Why did you overeat, until the body's own systems were distorted into diabetes? Were you yourself the cause of that sickness? High blood pressure, chronic heart disease — these diseases so often trace back to overeating.

As the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) is reported to have said, there is no worse vessel a human being fills than his own stomach; when a disbeliever eats, he eats with seven stomachs, while a believer eats with one. Excess in eating is not something the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) wanted for his community. There is the account of a large-bellied man he once saw, whose stomach he prodded, saying that this fat ought not to be there at all — it should be spread evenly through the body, in other words, that a person ought to run a little leaner than that. "I have got thick bones," comes the excuse most readily reached for. Losing weight thins the bones just as much, in fact — "it is genetic" changes nothing about that. None of this is a joke: obesity is a serious sickness, harder to overcome, some say, than quitting smoking, and it is a growing problem, as psychologists and dietitians alike will confirm. Islam already provides the balanced form of eating: wholesome, ḥalāl, unprocessed food, exactly what Allah (swt) commands in asking that people eat of the tayyibāt.