Domestic and Wild Animals, With and Without Molars

With that foundation laid, the teaching on ḥalāl food, which has already covered many things, turns to the animals a believer is allowed to eat: the animals that bleed, whose blood flows when they are slaughtered, or when they die, or when they are cut into pieces. Islamically speaking, the sharīʿah — the fiqh — divides the animals that may or may not be eaten into two categories, domestic and wild. Domestic animals are in themselves divided into two, those with molars and those without; and the wild animals are likewise divided into those without molars and those with. This is only a broad classification, but it makes sense once explained. Some of it may not seem immediately relevant to a twenty-first-century Muslim, but Islam is applicable to all times and ages, to all centuries, and to all regions of the world. The majority of people alive live in rural areas, not the urban lives of the first world or of modern cities: many live in the kampongs, the villages, the ḍayʿah — in the countryside — and they need to know these aḥkām in order to practise their dīn.

Among the domestic animals, those without molars are of three kinds according to the sharīʿah — three kinds meaning, simply: ḥalāl and mubāḥ to eat, ḥarām to eat, and makrūh taḥrīmī to eat. The terms already given now prove their use, and need no individual explanation again — ḥalāl meaning what Allah (swt) and His Messenger have declared, in the Book and the ḥadīth, permissible to eat. The domestic animals ḥalāl to eat are camels; cattle, or beef — that is, cows and bulls, the bullocks; veal; sheep, male and female, rams and ewes; goats; and the ox, an animal that many in Australia will probably never have seen — such is life in Australia. These are ḥalāl to eat provided they are slaughtered properly, which is explained later, and provided that under certain circumstances they fulfil certain criteria, which is returned to below. There are certain domestic animals which are absolutely impermissible, forbidden, ḥarām to eat. The domestic donkey, for example, cannot be slaughtered and eaten; nor the mule, if its mother was a donkey — a mule being the animal produced when a donkey and a horse are crossbred, and where its mother was a donkey it cannot be eaten: it is ḥarām. The third category is makrūh taḥrīmī, meaning close to ḥarām — detestable, very close to ḥarām to eat, but not ḥarām — and here stands the horse. "I never knew that we could eat horses," comes the reply; but under certain circumstances, at war, Islam has set some conditions, and the Uzbek Muslims of Russia eat horses. The mule from the horse, where its mother is a horse and not a donkey, is likewise makrūh taḥrīmī to consume. Then the domestic animals with molars: dogs, cats, and domestic leopards used for hunting or kept as pets are absolutely ḥarām to consume. Whether a person is Vietnamese or Chinese makes no difference — it is ḥarām, ḥarām, ḥarām; it cannot be done.

The wild animals follow the same division. Among those without molars, it is absolutely ḥalāl and mubāḥ, permissible, to eat deer — bucks, "Bambi" — wild cattle and wild camels, rabbits, and zebras, the animal called in Arabic the wild donkey. That is, permissible if one catches one — and if one is living in Africa — and, among the wild animals, it must be slaughtered according to Islam; nor can a zebra be kept as a pet, unless something else comes of it. Among the wild animals with molars, it is absolutely ḥarām and impermissible to eat, obviously, the pig and the boar, elephants, lions, tigers, wolves, hyenas, bears, monkeys, jackals, foxes, and all other forms of predatory wild cat. It is not allowed; they are ḥarām to consume.