Two Kinds of Dhakāh, and the Verse That Lists What Is Forbidden

There are two Arabic terms here, alike enough in an English rendering to be confused, though the middle letter differs: zakāh, the compulsory charity paid on wealth, and dhakāh, which means slaughter — the making pure, through the correct method, of an animal that is to be eaten. The Qurʾān itself uses this second word, as appears below.

Islamic law recognises two kinds of dhakāh. The first is ikhtiyārī, the optional kind: a person has time, is under no compulsion, and follows the full procedure at leisure. The second concerns an animal that cannot be reached in the ordinary way — trapped in a corner, dying, impossible to bring to where its throat can be cut in the usual manner — and for this the law provides its own special procedure, so that the animal need not simply be left to die and half a tonne of bull go to waste.^* The concern here is with the ikhtiyārī, the optional kind, and the manner in which it must be carried out to remain lawful; everything else — every method and every circumstance outside these two forms of dhakāh — Allah (swt) declares ḥarām, as set out in Sūrat al-Māʾidah, in the third verse:

It is absolutely ḥarām, forbidden: that which dies of itself; blood; the flesh of swine; that over which a name other than Allah's (swt) has been invoked; the strangled animal; the animal beaten to death; the animal that has died from a fall; the animal killed by being gored with a horn; and what a wild beast has partly eaten, except what a person is able to slaughter properly before it dies. Also forbidden is what is sacrificed on stone altars set up for idols, and the dividing of meat by the casting of arrows; that, the verse says, is transgression.