Animals of Land and Sea, and the Rules for Seafood

The third kind of thing eaten in this world, besides the mineral and the vegetable, is the animal — human beings being by nature meat-eaters — and here the sharīʿah is especially particular in its rulings on what is ḥalāl and what is ḥarām, a classification already fixed fourteen hundred years ago and nothing new. Learning it is a duty, even where a given point may seem to have no bearing on daily life just now: knowledge remains knowledge, and acquiring it, whether or not it is ever put to use, is itself among the greatest forms of worship. What is learned is stored away, and when the moment comes that it is needed, it is recalled — this was taught, and is not to be touched. Whoever does not know it, though, risks falling into what is ḥarām without realising it, and by then it is too late. The ḥadīth already given bears repeating: a single ḥarām morsel voids the reward of prayer and supplication for forty days. This is a serious matter, and ḥalāl food is essential to the building of an Islamic character.

Animals, broadly, are divided into two kinds: those that live upon the land, and those that live in the sea, giving two kinds of food — seafood, and the rest. It is worth recalling that not every Muslim, fourteen or fifteen hundred years ago, or even five hundred years ago, lived in a highly developed, urbanised city with supermarkets — a recent phenomenon that did not exist forty or fifty years ago, when small corner shops served instead, and before that neither; people lived alongside their animals, and off their own farmland, and needed to know these laws for exactly that reason.

Sea creatures fall under a rule of their own: Islam permits every form of seafood, with one exception drawn by the Ḥanafī school — the Aḥnāf. The Ḥanafī books teach that whatever comes from the sea is ḥalāl provided it is of the fish kind — not crustaceans, not shellfish, not crabs, lobsters or prawns, which the school regards as makrūh taḥrīmī, disliked to the point of being close to ḥarām. Even within the Ḥanafī school there are two positions: the Ḥanafīs of the Indian subcontinent and the Shāmī, Syrian Ḥanafīs disagree over gambarī, the prawn — the Syrian view holds it to be of the fish kind rather than a crustacean, while the subcontinental view, on grounds not entirely clear, insists that a crustacean is a crustacean and may not be eaten, calling it makrūh. The other three schools of law — the Mālikī, the Ḥanbalī and the Shāfiʿī — hold all of it to be absolutely ḥalāl. Imam al-Shāfiʿī is reported to have said that if he saw his own father emerge from the sea, he would eat him too, since Allah (swt) has declared seafood ḥalāl in the Qurʾān, and all forms of fish are lawful to eat.

Whales — not fish but mammals, though it makes no difference, since they live in the sea — sharks, eels and dolphins are named here deliberately, because one of the most common questions asked is whether sharks may be eaten. They may: a shark is a fish, even though sharks eat human beings. But the chance of a shark actually eating a person is comparable to being struck by lightning — something seen only in films. In real life, sharks do not go looking for the particular delicacy of a human being; they are simply Allah's (swt) creation, living in the sea as they do.

There is the account of a morning spent with his own father — a staunch Ḥanafī, and one who is not expected ever to hear of this being told — on Victoria Street, in the Vietnamese quarter, buying seafood for a gathering of brothers that evening. Ten or twenty-five blue swimmer crabs were on the list, and his father, knowing nothing of these particular rules, was browsing the fish and liking what he saw when he noticed him filling a basket on the crustacean side, and asked what he was doing. Getting crabs, came the answer. His father objected: ḥarām, makrūh, what was he doing? He replied, "Baba, with respect, there is no need to be so mutaʿaṣṣib," so strict — all three schools hold it ḥalāl, and even within the Ḥanafī school it is not ḥarām, only makrūh taḥrīmī, close to ḥarām but not named as such — and repeated Imam al-Shāfiʿī's own line, that he would eat his own father coming out of the sea. His father's only reply was a doubtful "hmm," and the guess that Imam al-Shāfiʿī must have been raised among the Vietnamese himself.

There is also the account of extensive travel through South-East Asia, and one stay in particular, in Brunei, in a village built on stilts over a lake, Kampong Ayer, standing for hundreds of years with its own masjid, its own schools, its own houses, the water running beneath as one walks through it. The government has offered its residents houses, cars and everything else on dry land, and still they will not leave, because food there is free: walk a few steps down, put a net into the water, and it comes up with twenty tiger prawns — ḥalāl indeed — grilled into mashwiya and eaten with contentment. The Ḥanafī reasoning for classing lobsters, prawns, crabs and other crustaceans as makrūh is that they turn the stomach — an understandable reaction for someone inland who sees nothing from the water but the occasional river fish, and is naturally put off by the sight of these odd, leg-waving creatures. Yet the Burmese, who live where prawns are eaten daily, nothing but prawns, feel no such revulsion. So: whoever is Ḥanafī and comfortable staying with the Ḥanafī position should do so, and is owed respect for it; but eating crustacean seafood is not, in itself, something to feel has been a ḥarām act — provided, of course, that no ḥarām ingredient has been used in the cooking.