Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-m8s7h Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-23T00:44:47.760Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Pig, Purity, and Permission in Mālikī Slaughter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2012

Mona Siddiqui
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Get access

Summary

It is impossible for persons of culture to keep the Dietary Laws.

C. G. Montefiore

Several years ago a retired academic and Church minister at Glasgow University stood next to me in line for a morning coffee in the University’s canteen. It was around 8.30 a.m. and the canteen was busy serving breakfast. We were both familiar faces at that time of the morning, but on this occasion he came up to me with his breakfast on his tray and said with a smile, ‘Mona, I could never convert to being a Muslim, I would miss my bacon butties too much.’ This gentleman, like many people in the West, was aware that Muslims generally observed the scriptural prohibition on eating pig meat but could not quite understand why. Indeed, he found it faintly amusing that worship of God could be reduced to a particular focus on dietary prohibitions, especially in relation to such succulent animals like the pig. But even after a brief conversation in which I tried to explain the issue of slaughter requirements in general and not just the prohibition on pig meat, he found it difficult to understand from his Christian perspective how dietary laws could continue to have any spiritual or indeed meaningful relevance in today’s society. In man’s relationship with God, surely there other more important ethical issues to be observed than the meat that one ate? It begged the larger question as to whether Muslims think of the transcendent and connect with the sacred primarily through the observance of certain rituals and obedience to certain laws.

Recently, an American Muslim colleague of mine, observing that I was scrutinising the fish and vegetarian dishes in a restaurant menu, asked me why I did not want to order a meat dish. In my response to him that I only ever ate meat that I knew to be ḥalāl, he looked puzzled and said, ‘Why are you making this an unnecessary problem for yourself? Just say “Bismillah” over the food and eat it.’

Type
Chapter
Information
The Good Muslim
Reflections on Classical Islamic Law and Theology
, pp. 67 - 89
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

‘Uzayr, Encyclopaedia of IslamLeidenBrill 1934 1062Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×