A Jacket of Pig Suede

There is a recent account, from after a Friday prayer — the second such case, evidently a developing habit of noticing people's jackets. A man who had attended the same masjid for many years, a fine man by any measure, was wearing a jacket whose pattern was recognisable at a glance; someone who knew the pattern asked to look at it, and he agreed readily — so readily that he offered the jacket outright as a gift, though the request had been only to look at it. The label read one hundred per cent pig suede. He explained that he had been wearing it for years, a gift from his father-in-law six years before, brought, he had always understood, from Pakistan — a Muslim land. The label told a different story: it had been made in China. Wearing anything of pig, whatever its origin, is absolutely unlawful; it cannot be touched.

Nor can it be used even as a sole beneath a shoe; donkey or horse hide is permitted there, but never pig. Real care is needed when buying shoes generally, because there is scarcely a manufacturer, in Australia or coming from overseas, that does not use such linings somewhere within the shoe. Even opening the lining up does not settle the question on its own: someone who knows leather can tell it from the pattern, and even ringing the manufacturer directly will confirm it, if asked.

A woman who heard this account went and checked all her own shoes and leather goods — her bags, her belts, her wallets as well — and found, subḥānAllāh, that a great many of them contained it; she got rid of perhaps three hundred different items in all, her husband's shoes included, and when he came home and asked what had become of his shoes, his expensive “ballet shoes”^*, the answer was simply that they too had been found to contain leather made from pig skin. Manufacturer after manufacturer, asked directly, gives the same answer: yes, it is used. What is wrong with that, to them? Nothing at all — to them it is nothing; to a Muslim it means everything. They use it because there is plenty of it — the majority of shoe manufacturing is done in China, where it is abundant — and because it is very easy to use in manufacturing, being soft, almost like human skin, and easy to work into a lining. On the outer of a shoe it cannot be used, because it is not hard enough and will simply rip; but inside, where softness matters more than strength, it is used freely. Real care is needed, then, with anything of this kind worn on the body: where any element of pig is present, the wuḍūʾ built upon it is not wuḍūʾ at all, the first condition of cleanliness having gone unmet. The concern is that some people love a particular item, a particular piece of clothing, so much — it looks so well on them — that even knowing there is a pig element in it, they simply ignore the fact. That is the real danger here, and it points to a defect, a weakness, in a person's own īmān; it is a warning, and a warning worth taking to heart.