Each Creature Suited to Its Own Sustenance

As a Muslim it is also believed that none of Allah's (swt) creation can ever be mixed up in terms of rizq: no two creatures of Allah (swt), whether two human beings or two animals, can ever have any more of their rizq, or any less, than what they have already been allotted. Allah (swt) constantly knows what the needs of His creation, His makhlūqāt, are; Allah (swt) knows what is in the wombs of the mothers, and Allah (swt) knows the whereabouts of every single dharrah, every particle, that He has created at all times. Allah (swt) also designed the rizq of every kind of creature according to that particular species, and there is no mixing between them: what suits one kind of creation may not suit another — some are carnivores, and some, one might say, are vegetarians.

Were Allah (swt) to have created tigers with wings, no other species would be left on earth; instead He gave every creature both the limits and the ability it needed, matched exactly to what it must eat. To meddle with the nature Allah (swt) gave a creature is to meddle with something far larger than it appears.

There is the account of a man who, in the early 1980s, went away to university, to one of the townships nearby, and could not at first find a place to live, so that for the first fortnight he stayed with an Australian family. The woman of the house was vegan, and kept a hunting dog that she had decided, for the previous six months, to raise as a vegetarian, giving it no meat at all, only vegetables. The dog would not stop crying — constantly wailing, refusing to move — and when asked why, she explained that she was training it to be vegetarian, since meat, to her mind, was murder. While she was at work he went to the butcher, and the dog and he became the best of friends, jumping up and down for joy. To change the nature Allah (swt) gave a creature in this way is no small thing. Dogs and cats, fed as Allah (swt) intended them to be fed, are never seen to develop diabetes or high blood pressure; it is human beings who abuse their own systems, who eat every kind of rubbish, and who modify what Allah (swt) made naturally organic — genetically modified food included — and who as a result fall sick. It is people themselves who play with their own rizq and turn it into something senseless.

Allah (swt) created for every creature its own suitable nourishment, nothing more and nothing less, and there is something genuinely fascinating in this, something that draws out subḥānAllāh, subḥānAllāh from anyone who looks at it closely. Allah (swt) says, in Sūrat al-Dhāriyāt:

Many know the first part of this āyah well and repeat it often — that Allah (swt) did not create jinnkind or mankind except to worship Him — yet immediately afterwards Allah (swt) says that He wants no rizq from His creation, and does not want to be fed by them; on the contrary, He is the one who provides their rizq, their sustenance, their nourishment, their entire livelihood. This is guaranteed, and it is the belief of a Muslim.