An Animal Invoked in a Name Other Than Allah's, and the Rest of the List

An animal over which another name than Allah's (swt) has been invoked at the time of slaughter is forbidden — a matter taken up again at length below, when the food of the People of the Book comes under discussion.

An animal found strangled — crushed in a corner, say, by a fallen tree, trapped beneath the timber and dead — is forbidden, as is one beaten to death, whether by a person or, as sometimes happens, by another animal: a savage beast set upon it in a fight and left it dead in pieces. An animal that has died from a fall is forbidden on the same footing, and so is one killed by being gored with the horn of another animal, as when two horned beasts fight and one is killed.

What a wild beast has partly eaten is likewise forbidden — the half of a cow a tiger has abandoned, having taken its fill and moved on. A person is not permitted to make a meal of what a predator has left behind, in the manner of a hyena or a jackal; the one exception is an animal still alive enough, when it is found, to be properly slaughtered — dhakkaytum is Allah's (swt) own word for this in the verse, the same root that names the whole subject of lawful slaughter.

The last two things the verse names belong to the pre-Islamic practice of Makkah: some among the mushrikīn of the Quraysh used to slaughter animals on stone altars raised for their idols,^*** and to divide meat among themselves by the casting of arrows, a form of divination. Neither has anything to do with what the sharīʿah sanctions, and Allah (swt) calls both a transgression.