Land Animals Without Blood

Some land animals live for the most part on land but partly in water, and these are avoided in eating; sand crabs, different from the crabs of the sea, are one such case, and need to be told apart carefully. Shellfish — mussels, oysters, the kind that must be opened — do come from the sea and may be eaten by whoever has the stomach for it, though cooking them is recommended. One trap to avoid is the belief that eating a great many of these before marriage works as an aphrodisiac — pure foolishness, and a good way to be poisoned instead. Prawns in particular must be properly cleaned and deveined, because they are the earth's scavengers — the cleanest creatures there are^**, eating last, at the very bottom of the food chain, whatever falls from above them — and what is left uncleaned can make a person sick.

Land animals themselves are classed, in the fiqh books' own terms, into three categories. The first is whatever has no blood — cut it open and none is found, even though, strictly, some of these creatures may have blood too small to see, and biology would no doubt give them their own proper classification with its own exceptions; these terms come instead from books written for the ordinary village person with no schooling in biology, and deserve credit for explaining matters in the plainest possible way. Bees, flies, spiders, scorpions, ants, snails, slugs, worms and locusts, among others in this category, may not be eaten at all — with one exception: a particular species of locust, dead or alive, which is ḥalāl, since this has precedent from the time of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) in Madīnah. Every other insect, and any additive or colouring made from one — one such colouring, used in certain lollies, is worth checking for — is absolutely ḥarām to consume.

Someone might object that eating a grasshopper at all sounds implausible — the rules are not invented for the occasion. There is the account of a visit to Madīnah, in a year of unusually little rain, when locusts appeared in numbers never seen before — huge swarms of them, real mothers of locusts, big ones, flying in — and were made into a good kebab. From the time of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) himself comes the report that his companions used to eat a particular kind of lizard — a desert lizard, of the kind an Australian would call a goanna — and that he said of it only that he would not call it ḥarām, but that he personally would not eat it, since his own stomach would not take it. So this one species of locust is ḥalāl whether found dead or caught alive — but not frogs, and not snails; a Muslim need not aspire to be French in that particular respect.

A further point concerns worms commonly found in fruit, in cheese — no particular cheese need be named — in mushrooms, and in vinegar. Where a worm is still inside the fruit when it is eaten — an apple, an apricot, a pear, whatever the fruit may be — and only discovered afterward, having gone down along with it, this is ḥalāl; it is even makrūh to go searching a fruit for worms before eating it. There is the account of a childhood garden that used no pesticides and no sprays at all, everything grown organically, in a time when such insects had shared the world alongside the fruit for thousands of years, as a matter of course; a small hole, barely visible, would mark where a fruit worm had gone in, and sometimes, halfway through eating, it turned out that half the worm was already gone. This is permissible, mubāḥ, to eat — a person who prefers not to is entitled to that preference, but it remains ḥalāl. The same rule applies to worms found already in cheese or in the other items named. What is different is a worm found crawling loose — on the street, on a table, on a plate — which may not be picked up and eaten; that is ḥarām. Can it really be imagined that every fruit found to carry a worm should be declared ḥarām? How much of any harvest would then have to be thrown away as rubbish? Whoever comes across such fruit — in an orchard town such as Shepparton, say, or anywhere else in the country where fruit must be picked and eaten — should eat without concern; nobody has ever died from eating a fruit worm. A worm in cheese, in a mushroom, or in vinegar has not personally been encountered, though the fiqh books affirm that these too exist, and the same ruling applies while the worm remains inside — Shanklish, for instance, may well carry one, for all that is known.