Why is pork haram? | Mufti Abu Layth

here this is the verse uh there are a number of verses in the quran that speak about hindi this topic of pig so what i want us to do is take a look at this verse and then we'll go into some of the islamic discussion surrounding it and then the kind of teleological analysis of why the kind of makkah sid and development of this ruling so let's begin with this verse that you can see here in suratul

verse 145 this is actually an amazing verse by the way of the quran uh and i'll discuss it in more detail on another occasion this verse as padilla arabic says the great maleki legend is the basis of all dietary law because in this verse it states that there nothing is haram except this so this is why according to the school of medina the maliki method that no animal is haram apart from pig so

animals may be discouraged they may be fine they may be good they may be but no animal according to the mainstream school or the main school view that no animal is haram beyond pig so just bar pig because this that's what this verse reads and the maliki school is unique in that position but we'll discuss that on another day how a single verse can lead to so much difference of opinion

right i do not find anything from what has been revealed unto me haram for one to eat unless it is a dead animal so note here that the dead animal the animal may not be haram but it's because it was already dead the carcass

that's haram right so illa and yakuna meter tan odamama blood that has been shed so there were certain pagan practices that they would drink the blood so that is uh what is haram note it's not speaking about blood that is still within animals but it's talking about the blood that is shed so they would kind of in a cup get it and they would drink it as a pagan practice

or the meat of pig of swine now this you see or sacrificing to other than god now here once again this is a contingency ruling like the dead animal the animal itself may not be haram but because it's being offered as a pagan sacrifice therefore the contingency makes it hara okay

and that's always amazing that note that whenever allah speaks about meat being haram mostly follows it by saying that look but if you know if somebody's starving or somebody's doing it you know and allah didn't have to say that not each time but here it is just reminding that you know by the way we're not talking about the exceptions we're talking about the rule so pig this as you can imagine has

it's there's a lot of questioning about why the pig is haram in this verse let's what we're going to do is just take a brief look here then we're going to step back understand the islamic rulings around the pig and then we'll come back to some of the historicity note right that here the word rich is used so it is impure now what does that exactly mean because when allah says it is impure the scholars have discussed what is the

it going back to the pronoun that it is it going back to everything or is it just going back to the pig so many have said it's going back to the pig some have said it's going back to everything but even if it goes back to the pig the word rich is used i believe nine times in the quran most on most occasions it's a metaphorical rich like

from god descended upon them or that the the mushrikeen were rich or that this it was a metaphorical kind of impurity mostly when it's used but it can refer to something literal as well so in the quran the other verse speaking about alcohol and then saying gambling and also drawing lots that is ridge the same word is followed okay so okay we've got that that's fine now i want us to pause that for a while whilst we take a look at some islamic rulings around pig then

we're going to come back to this okay so we'll just wait for the slide to change now in islam once again now if this is new to some of you it is not a uh let me just forward that we'll come back to that this right if this is new to some of you then that's really just for a lack of your own understanding you have to remember that islam is incredibly diverse and sometimes you may come across opinions that you're not used to and that's fine in fact that's an

a step towards hopefully towards enlightenment and education to learning and getting more light in there right so within our tradition the pig we start off with is the pig impure okay and in fact before we even go to impure let's look at haram all scholars agree for generally speaking that the pig is haram right this is one of the most agreed upon rulings in islam that everybody agrees

that pig is haram and in fact it has become an identity marker for muslims there was a small difference on other there was a small difference on the non-meat aspect of pigs so for example what about the fat of pigs pig fat is that also haram most scholars would feel that yes everything you know eating the pig in any way is haram imam shokani disagrees he

he argues that allah whenever allah mentions he mentions the meat and doesn't mention and therefore that would suggest he uh he argues that it is only the meat that is haram or oh he says that he he doesn't leave it quite clear that does he himself feel it's fine to eat the pig fat but he argues for it for its permissibility the second question but the majority of the scholars clearly all say it's haram

all aspects of pig fat pig meat whichever way you look at it the next question is is the pig impure is it impure now you'll be surprised to know that many ulama within islam do not consider the pig to be impure okay although many others have so yes people like the shafa in mather the hanafi method humbly method is divided they field especially the shaffer ease they feel the pig is nadja lain it is impure to its core

in its essence it is impure many hanafis agree with them some people say imam hanifah didn't but the hanafi mother generally agrees that the pig is impure to its core the maliki mother clearly from imam malik down disagrees with that maliki method said every living creature is always pure including the pig it is not impure it's just haram to eat and obviously when you eat it it's dead so but life the principle in the school of medina according to imam malik is life

necessitates purity so every living creature every living cell everything is that's alive is always pure so according to them if so let's say a pig was to drink out of a bowl now you have the famous hadith that if a dog drinks out of a bowl do you have to wash it so because according to the maliki method that that washing is just for hygiene purposes not because it's impure because life necessitates purity so the maliki method says no so the same thing with the pig

many ulamas some of the shaft many of the shaft yeah in fact many of them said it's the mathematic many of the hanafis as well and some humblys as well argued that if a pig drinks from a bowl you have to wash the bowl seven times or three times to make it pure the maliki method disagreed and said that no life is necessitates purity it may be a hygiene issue but it's not a filth or impurity issue so you can already see the difference of opinion from these great imams like imam malik coming all the way down the next question is okay what

about pig hair and this is used in brushes and it's still used today so once again the ulama disagreed and the maliki method says pig here is pure it's not it's not impure and you can use it there's nothing wrong with using pig here that's what imam could to be writing is tafsir um and that's generally the maliki view in addition to that they also there's a tradition that people bring that ibn abbas i think they they bring ibn abbas

tradition i believe and some other self would have sandals or shoes that contain pig here so they use this as evidence as well this is also the view that ibn tamiya went to in saying pig is fine because it doesn't really the life you know because they say no blood is in here so therefore it's kind of pure and i feel some hanafi's kind of did also go that way but the majority of the hanafia majority of the shafi'ir majority of the hamburlees all say pig here is impure and you can't use it or have it whereas the maliki school

clearly says pig here is fine it's pure you can have brushes brushes made out of it or whatever you want the next ruling is leather the hide the skin of pig now here once again people disagree because there is a hadith of the prophet any hide the leather that you of any animal it says kulu every animal if you clean it it is pure so based on this people like shabi from the seller from tabarin

abu yusuf from the hanafiya imam malik his student ibn another great maliki and also the those who were kind like imam dawud and other people all said pig leather is halal and it's fine because they said that once it's cleaned and whatever tanning process you have to clean it they said that's fine once it's clean it is and that's what the hadith states so they say that's fine other people like most of the chef most of the hanafiya even many of the

malikis and many of the humblys apart from so i didn't mention imam malik i mentioned says this is the view of the method that's what he says so the maliki's may have a disagreement but this is a well-known position within the maliki method as well that and in fact often led by them that that leather all leather even if it's pig leather is always pure so you can see straight away that there's quite a hmm you see now this may come as cognitive dissonance to

many people because they will think oh i thought pig is like absolutely disgusting and uh you know it's like so impure right that you can't even say its name so when we were kids we wouldn't say the word pig we thought that that was sinful to say pig oh this is what people had told us they said you're not allowed to say pig you have to say p-i-g [Laughter] so i don't know how many people can relate to that so but yet

it's nothing like that because hindi is in the word hindi there's nothing wrong with the word kinsey it's in the quran the meat of swine of pig and pig itself according to many ulama of islam including imam malik is pure itself as in it's not impure like if it touched you you don't need to wash i mean if you want to wash that's fine but it's not impure it's not nudges okay it's saliva is not learnt nudges it's here is not nudges and you can use it for brushes its leather is fine you can use pig leather and this is all within

the mainstream sunni islam okay so you can already see these views are quite bewildering and some people even argued about pig fat being not haram but that wasn't them that was an extreme that's imam shaukani arguing for that but you can see there's quite a bit of wow okay i didn't expect this kind of color and you know color dynamics and diversity about pig right now okay so we put that aside now

we want to take a look at right yes somebody said it was a curse word yeah absolutely i mean i we weren't when we were kids we were told not to say and if you say you know it makes your tongue impure and i remember being in a proper dilemma at school because i had to read this story and it said pig and i remember thinking and they were saying oh you're not allowed to say the word and i was thinking what do i do you got like this little seven-year-old trying to figure what do i do malfunction

right so now i want to take a look at why is the pig considered rich and impure and the only animal that is singled out in the quran as haram to the extent that the school of medina imam malik school said no other animal in islam is haram to eat they may be discouraged but no animal is haram apart from pig the question is why pig because does god detest the pig and hate the pig clearly not that is not the case god

does not hate the pig the pig is a creature like any other creature of god it's not something allah hates the pig allah has never said he hates the pig so this is a misconception that we have okay right now i'll just bring this back up i'll show you now this is the answer that we have been given and i want to take a look at this then i'm going to pause it the this is by maimonides in his guide for the perplex that the pig's habits and its food are very dirty and loathsome

so when people say why is pig such a detested creature in islam the understanding that we get from the jewish tradition is that well it's you know it's dirty and it's loathsome now this is important pause this for a moment we have to remember that islam in many ways is a continuation of the mosaic tradition islam carries on the abrahamic faiths so you have judaism you have

christianity which is really just part of judaism and in many ways islam is a continuation of that of judaism as well because it's in many ways it's not jewish but it's it's an extension and a continuation of the mosaic kind of tradition obviously with its own laws though so it will inherit this culture there is no doubt that the swine prohibition is inherited from the jewish law it's there in the book of leviticus it's there in the book of deuteronomy

okay and that it is mentioned that you shall not eat from the swine because right although it has uh cleft hooves it doesn't chew the cut it doesn't ruminate so the animals that kind of ruminate their food so they kind of digest it like cows do so they have different compartments within their stomach they have like four stomachs or whatever number of stomachs and they have to chew and then they regurgitate and they chew it again and they keep doing that all day and that's expressed in the bible as to chew the curd so for an animal to be pure for the

israelites it had to have cleft hooves and it had to chew the curd so the bible mentions about swine that it is forbidden for you because although it has cleft hooves it has cloven hooves but it doesn't chew the curd now the bible doesn't mention about it being filthy or it doesn't go into much explanation on why apart from this so okay we know that it was definitely prohibited for the jews and we as muslims have inherited this from the jewish tradition

so it's one way of understanding you see we'll never have absolute knowledge i want to put this first of all make this statement that look why is it haram the way it is we can just have our assessment this is an assessment that i'm presenting to you um you know if it appeals to you that's fine if it doesn't that's fine okay so what i showed you here when we look at the jewish tradition because if we want insight for this it's best to go to their tradition why is it so hated in the jewish tradition because it is because

so we find them saying it's about its food and its condition it's a very dirty creature which it is unquestionably okay so let's just pause that and we have to go through a bit of history about the pig so the pig if you go back i don't know about 6 000 years ago was an incredibly popular animal okay in in that kind of the near east why because it was easy to breed and it it's kind of it grew very quickly

rapidly so within a year you've got a full fledged pig that you can eat a lot of protein and also they were relatively easy to keep they didn't take up much space and they ate your garbage so if you chucked out garbage and garbage and trash they would eat that for you so if you go back about 6 000 years ago they were incredibly popular and all these you know if all these not only people all these kind of royalties have them because they use them

then religious practices start because they eat the garbage they started to be seen as scapegoats that you can kind of put your sacrifice them and get rid of the spiritual filth okay so you so you find certain there's certain sumerian uh tablets that are found that speak of offerings of pigs of many pigs and these were a scapegoat they kind of took on the sins of the people around them so you had this culture they're incredibly popular and they're great they eat people's trash and people you know don't have to worry

about anything so this is going on then you go into the early bronze age as time moves forward the popularity of the pig decreases massively okay so from about 4 000 bc onwards to about let's say 3006 and for about 4 500 years you start to see a rapid you start to see a gradual first decline in pigs from about the years 3600 bc to about 15

um 1500 bc something like that the the kind of late bronze age there is a drastic decline in pig popularity swine popularity so how do we know this one obviously from the kind of archaeological findings where we have cuneiform tablets and things but better than that from the bones so archaeological digs have shown how much percent of bones cattle bones were pig bones so you start to see them drop with the era so when you're going towards just before

moses's time just before so from the time of um 3600 up until 1500 bc whatever which is around the time of musa alaihissalam but before that all that time they rapidly declined in appreciation people see all of a sudden they're seen as very filthy they were already seen as filthy but this garbage eating feature of these it loses flavor so people now see them as filthy the other thing is they don't bear any secondary

utility so whereas cows give milk sheep give wool pigs don't give anything they give meat that's great and they eat rubbish but they don't give any utility so the new kingdoms like the mesopotamian kingdoms and these the babylonians these people start to see less utility in them so they start to advocate for cattle for other cattle that are actually more beneficial for the for the empire for the kingdoms in fact

i believe about 2000 bc they are banished pigs are banished from um mesopotamian temples and also certain other uh the babylonian certain temples around the near east they start to become banished and banned from those because they're too filthy and now they're just left to an underclass so who takes care of them the underclass of society so they become associated with the low class around this time they also fall out of flavor in egypt

so the egyptian culture starts to show that the the develops a dislike towards the pig some people say this may have been um [Music] bolstered by the epic or the myth of uh seth see according to the egyptian story so in the book of the dead you have the story that seth takes on the form of a pig and attacks to kill horus horus being the loved deity so some anthropologists have argued that

this gave rise to the this became the beginning point for pig animosity or pig kind of hatred amongst the egyptian culture the same thing as you can see like the serpent and the abrahamic cultures there's a disliking to the serpent and the story of the satan became a serpent and tricked adam so people see the snake as this cunning and because the egyptians had a similar story of seth kind of taking the guise of a pig so the pig becomes this detested creature

within egyptian or at least a disliked culture and some people say that's for his attack on horus nevertheless around this time this depreciation you have to also keep in mind that pigs are they don't have sweat glands and especially in that part of the world with incredible heat they do require a lot of water so you have to take all of these things into consideration because as a farmer you have to choose what what are you going to do pigs are terrible for pastoralists but they are good in just small

confined enclosures but not for pastoralists and then they consume a lot of water they are very uh filthy to look at when they are just wallowing in their kind of dirt and and it is true that when they do also um consume their feces but that said usually if you know under drought conditions and things like that they do consume their own feces now this you may say other animals may do that as well at times but you see you have to put this all together to paint paint a social picture okay just to first of all get that

sociological picture that as the mosaic as musa alayhi islam's time is coming musa islam isn't even there yet as he's coming this is the landscape people already don't like this creature the pig and it's already a burden and it's seen with the underclass then something that i haven't mentioned i did um right the pig also is known as one of the few creatures one of the few animals that does carry certain parasites that can infect you either fatally or considerably so it

does have certain tapeworms but also the specifically it's i did write it down trichinella's paralysis which leads to trichinosis now trichinosis although it was discovered only a few centuries ago a couple of centuries ago that it's what if it's a consequence of undercooked pork and it can lead to things like extreme vomiting diarrhea and sometimes very severe infections as well so other creatures can have it but really it's namely with the pig so you do have this trigonosis so you do have health hazards as well

so you can imagine back then people getting sick eating the pig and the pig is this filthy creature wallowing in this dirt and then it's eat consuming at times its feces and doesn't offer any secondary value and it's also with the underclass of society and all of this is contributing to a a picture baggage of this creature now in the time what now the mosaic law comes pigs have been made haram in the jewish bible when the pig is made

haram not much detail is given except that it just doesn't chew the cut so it doesn't digest its food like the way the cow does that's all it doesn't say actually they were filthy or they were this or they were that but it is haram for them so okay this is definitely the basis i then also another view as well as many anthropologists and i also feel that this does carry some currency uh that many anthropologists and historians have looked at is the filth backdrop consolidates further down the line

so although the haram the tahrim is the from the beginnings that this is haram for them now as time moves on the story adds more kind of texture to it so what do i mean by that so first of all when the israelites move to the middle east so after moses they go and conquer and the kingdom and set up the kingdom of israel when they set up the kingdom of israel there was the first point was they were the local people that were residing there you had uh the who were like who

were known as the sea people from the aegean islands and referred to as the philistines okay that's not philistine of today although the name goes back to that but they so these were not arabs or semites these were people from around where greece is modern-day greece and that but they had kind of migrated and they were living there before they are the people that initially fight dawood alayhi salam and all these people to fight david goliath and that's who they were these aegean people one the one suggestion has been that when

the israelites arrive there and they set up settlements and this kind of this kind of battles they go on for a while a considerable while before the israelites take over and establish the kingdom one argument is that the the residents of that region would eat pork so this further it added one more layer of us versus them okay it's not huge but it's a little fine now the kingdom of israel is set up great another thing is with the kingdom of israel once again now that it's a mighty kingdom uh it's set up

there is the other so with the other you reinforce your own identity fine that's moving forward like let's say what's left of uh you know the babylonians and things like this after the great monarchy the united monarchy is divided israel has two kingdoms so you have northern israel which the northern kingdom which is called israel and you have the southern kingdom which is the kingdom of judah where jerusalem which was the main part and all the jewish major scribes were from judah they were from the south i should have let me check

uh i'll see if i have a picture here right okay so let me show you so you can see there there is a just an example of a map divided the kingdom of judah and the kingdom of israel now what's interesting here check this this is also the era that the bible is rewritten so the jewish bible when the the um the israelites are released from the babylonian captivity they come back and in the time that follows they rewrite the bible

ezra and all the other rabbis as well now the most of them reside in the southern kingdom what's interesting is archaeological studies have shown that from that era right the kingdom of israel the northern kingdom had up to from the bones that were found from that era of cattle they found up to eight percent of them to be pig bones so it appears that the northern kingdom actually the jewish people in the

northern kingdom did have and must have been eating pig whereas the southern kingdom excavations and archaeological findings don't show hardly any pig bones at wool from that era so that's interesting so one um one possibility here is the southern where kingdom of judah the judah heights where all these scribes and ezra and all these people are where jerusalem is they and there's rivalry by the way between the northern kingdom and the southern they see the northerners as less

jewish that you're not and one of the demarcating factors is look at them they eat pig you know like so it reinforces the identity and remember this is the time they're writing a lot of the early jewish scripture so that identity thing is getting consolidated even further but it doesn't stop the this is just the kind of beginning what happens is as this as time progresses

the whole jewish kingdom the whole jewish kingdom collapses to who alexander the great he captures it and the animosity that there is what what is one of the clear things that the greeks do they eat pig it's an identity thing once again you've got a bit of that us versus them it's just adding a little notch after alexander the kingdom the seleucid kingdom that follows you know with his children and after his children the seleucid kingdom you have a ruler by the name of you've got here uh antiochus

now him uh i'll just try and bring up oh you can see the picture there right there it is right so antiochus iv one of the things he does is he incredibly persecutes ruthlessly persecutes the jewish people he um he kind of he absolutely apart from uh apart from torturing and murdering and all the kind of atrocities that you can imagine but he also uh attacks the temple the great jewish the great temple of

jerusalem he attacks that and he desanctifies it what he does is as a sacrilege he he slaughters pigs at the altar in the holy of the holies so he goes to the holy of the holies which normal people can't even go into right and antiochus what he does is he has pigs slaughtered because he knows they don't need pig at that altar within the holy of the holies where normal jewish people aren't even allowed to go because they're not pure enough

here he smothers that with pig blood this sacrilege hits so deep in the jewish psyche that it leaves a scar that would follow for centuries he doesn't stop here by the way antiochus what he does is he bans jewish practices he um bans circumcision and one of the interesting things he does is he would force he would force people he would force several jewish people to eat pig

and if they didn't he would just torture them i mean he would basically be toying with them so he'd get people he'd torture them uh and one of the tests like with the inquisition you saw with muslim spain he would torture people and make them eat swine and there's certain uh these references to this uh within jewish literature and then you would kill them if they you know if they didn't many people would resist it this became that iman thing for them that will you eat the pig eat it and i'll let you live and i won't eat it i'll die of death and and this is it people stood their ground

and they were massacred and murdered but the litmus test not the litmus test but this kind of the final ultimatum that would often be given to them would be to eat swine now this is further burying into the jewish psyche this repulsive hatred towards swine flesh pig meat this eventually leads to the maccabean revolt who actually take over from the seleucids and actually have a kingdom the husband and they have uh their

kingdom for about 120 years or something something like that so you can see how deep this is into the the jewish psyche and then to add to it when the with the uh following uh jesus salam the new converts to what what was still judaism but the new judaism which is christianity they said that we will still eat like those laws don't apply to us so they still ate pork

so you can see the kind of shock factor and the repulsive um kind of um tremors that it sent to the jewish community that wow that these people they you know they claim to want to take from our tradition and yet they eat this look they eat pig this is to the early christian community and check this to the extent that jews aren't even allowed to have blood in their meat they have to drain blood out of their meat and the christians claim to drink the blood of christ and eat his flesh

as part of the eucharist so you can see these traditions led to a very deep seated repulsive animosity towards pig meat this lay in the jewish psyche for centuries and centuries later is the advent of islam and in that time islam also in many ways is continuing from the mosaic tradition is following musa alaysalam the abrahamic laws and you have to remember that a lot of the quran is

saying that oh people of the book and much of the quran is addressing the israelites and it's continuing their tradition so this thing of the of swine being so deep in the psyche and keeping in mind that the pig was already an animal that had it did have health concerns trichognosis it did also have uh filth kind of aspects to it it it was also out of currency and out of flavor

in the middle east people weren't really they weren't interested it was already associated with the underclass and then islam arrives and it is a continuation of this abrahamic tradition so it consolidates that law saying pig is haram okay so it is haram to eat and it is the only animal that has been declared haram in the quran per se in and of itself so as a continuation of the mosaic law but the filth aspect

is really what lay deep down in the in the psyche of the israelites and islam kind of honored the tradition if you like although it didn't really say it in that way as you already heard that many ulama felt that the pig was absolutely pure imam malik the school of medina they felt there's nothing you know it's not an impure creature it's saliva it's not impure it's leather is not impure it's hair is not impure but it honored that tradition of that was coming from the mosaic law and the is bani israeli

so that's what i feel why we have this so there is a health concern that is true uh trigonosis but in addition to that you have this socio psychosocial backdrop and landscape in addition to cultural developments that took place over the centuries i hope that sheds some light