Machine Slaughter, Electric Shock, and One Bismillāh for a Multitude

Al-Sharabāsī, in Yasʾalūnaka, states that without doubt, whether the meat comes from the East or the West, the food and the slaughtering of Ahl al-Kitāb is ḥalāl, because Allah (swt) made it ḥalāl in the Qurʾān: the food of those given the Book is lawful to you. All the fuqahāʾ hold that where a person is not present at the slaughter, and neither sees with the eyes nor hears with the ears what was said, it becomes ḥalāl to eat it, even where the animal was cut by machine, or beheaded in one go from the top rather than from the proper place — which is makrūh according to the Aḥnāf but still edible — or cut from the top in a way that still lets it bleed, not the best method but still ḥalāl. Even Muslims in Muslim countries have adopted machine slaughter: thousands of chickens, and thousands of other animals, are slaughtered by specialised machines every day, and the majority of today's ʿulamāʾ give fatwā that this is ḥalāl in a Muslim country. In a non-Muslim country, the general rule of the food of Ahl al-Kitāb covers this same case — but where hand-slaughtered meat from a properly run abattoir and a ḥalāl butcher is genuinely available, that should always be the first preference.

As already described, some animal-welfare organisations have proposed stunning or shocking an animal before slaughter so that it does not feel pain — a mushroom gun for larger beasts, a brief electric shock for sheep and lambs, in the region of ten to fifteen seconds, during which the Muslim slaughterman does his work. Nothing of this appears in the fatwā books, old or new — no mention of fainting an animal first, or giving it an injection so that it lies down and sleeps before being slaughtered; this practice of stunning is entirely new, unpractised before, though it is now practised in Australia.

A question naturally arises: is a single Bismillāh enough for five thousand animals? Put like that, on first hearing, it seems not to make sense — but where a slaughterman is working in an abattoir and has to slaughter twenty thousand, or five thousand, sheep, cattle or chickens, the ʿulamāʾ say that saying Bismillāhir Raḥmānir Raḥīm once, at the first animal, suffices — it is not possible to keep pace saying Bismillāh, Bismillāh, Bismillāh for every single one, and one Bismillāh said at the start is enough, provided the activity is not broken off. Should the slaughterman stop to have a conversation with someone, he says Bismillāh again on returning to the work; otherwise, with a machine as much as by hand, the one Bismillāh already said is enough. Even where a Muslim forgets to say it altogether, the meat remains edible, because he is a Muslim — saying Bismillāh is not itself farḍ. Forgetting it in the excitement of the work, and not, for instance, discarding the animal as ruined because of it, is not a problem according to the sharīʿah. One Bismillāh is enough even for twenty thousand animals, so long as the slaughterman is attending to the work throughout and not breaking off into conversation.