Honey, Vinegar, and Concoctions of One's Own

There is the account of someone who once insisted that a jar of honey was ḥarām, bought as it was with ḥalāl money, ḥalāl earnings. Asked how that could possibly be, the answer came: the bees had crossed onto someone else's property, into a neighbour's meadow — a non-Muslim neighbour's flowers — and taken pollen from there to make the honey; therefore ḥarām. This is pure jāhiliyyah, ignorance, plain and simple — such people genuinely exist, and this has been heard, exactly so, with his own ears. Ḥalāl is clear; ḥarām is clear.

There is likewise the account of a telephone call in which an hour and a half was spent convincing the caller that vinegar is ḥalāl, because the label read "wine vinegar" and, so far as the caller was concerned, that meant wine. Asked whether any real knowledge of the sharīʿah lay behind the objection — whether a book of fiqh had ever been opened and the section on vinegar actually read — since Islam is a complete way of life covering every corner of human existence, and it would be extraordinary indeed if Muslims had spent centuries consuming a vinegar made from khamr without anyone noticing it was ḥarām. The same reasoning gets turned on balsamic vinegar: a label reading "four years," with four small leaves printed on it, taken as proof enough of some hidden fermentation — astaghfirullāh al-ʿaẓīm, no. Without knowledge of the sharīʿah, without knowledge of the actual rulings, people invent concoctions of their own — precisely the point made at the outset: practice without proper ʿilm, taught by the ʿulamāʾ al-kirām according to Ahl al-Sunnah wa al-Jamāʿah, mainstream Islam, is always distorted, however sincere the person holding it. It tips to one extreme or the other. At one extreme stands what people call the ultra-orthodox position — treating even the air as though it were poisonous, a mask fitted, others told not to breathe it; or three and a half hours spent in a supermarket working through the ingredient list of a single item, checking every additive code against a phone before it can be trusted. At the other extreme stand those who simply do not care — a trip to a fast-food chain, Kentucky Fried Chicken mocked in passing as "Kentucky Licking Chicken," finger-licking chicken, waved through as ḥalāl without a second thought. Both extremes are to be seen constantly.