8. HALAL MEAT CONFUSING Khaleelpudur02:29 0 comments

 

Question:

Many Muslim owned stores sell meat which one assumes is halaal. However I have seen the empty cartons from the suppliers to these stores which make no mention of the meat being halaal. Please, for the sake of Allah, tell us one word about eating meat in the United States. Is it halal or haram?

Answer:                                                                                                                      

Dear brother in Islam, thank you for your question which reflects your care to have a clear view of the teachings of Islam. Allah commands Muslims to refer to people of knowledge to learn more about the teachings of Islam.

Allah permits us to consume animals slaughtered by Jews and Christians. There is only one condition, that is, the animal must be properly slaughtered. So we cannot consume the meat of any animal that is not allowed in the first place (such as pork) or one that has not been slaughtered by slitting its jugular vein.

We should refer to Quran in this respect which states :

“Forbidden to you (for food) are: dead meat, blood, the flesh of swine, and that on which hath been invoked the name of other than Allah; that which hath been killed by strangling, or by a violent blow, or by a headlong fall, or by being gored to death; that which hath been (partly) eaten by a wild animal; unless ye are able to slaughter it (in due form); that which is sacrificed on stone (altars); (forbidden) also is the division (of meat) by raffling with arrows: that is impiety…...”  (Al-Maida 5:3)

So if Islamically slaughtered meat is available, you should select it; and you should consider the meat of the People of the Book as a last alternative.

In his response to your question, Sheikh Muhammad Al-Mukhtar Ash-Shinqiti, Director of the Islamic Center of South Plains, Lubbock, Texas, states the following:

One sentence is not enough to answer such a complex question. For example, I myself used to eat meat when I first came to the United States, but then I stopped eating beef for 3 years. Only after conducting research and several field studies, I feel confident that meat in the US is halal as long as you mention the name of Allah before eating it. There are three basic conditions that make meat halal as follows:

1. That the name of Allah is mentioned over the animal. This can be done after it is slaughtered.

2. That the method of slaughter causes the blood to be drained. Animals are slaughtered using this method in America.

3. That the animals are slaughtered in a merciful way. I believe that the methods used in the United States to slaughter animals are more merciful to animals than those used in many Muslim countries.

Moreover, the US Congress issued a law called The Humane Slaughter of Animals Act. The law requires that specific methods that cause less pain to the animal be used for slaughtering. As for the claims by some scholars that a lot of these animals die as a result of being stunned before having their jugular vein slit,I conducted research on this subject and found that these claims are baseless. This is so because the reports by the general inspector of the US Government confirmed that a lot of animals do not get affected by the stunning so when they are slaughtered, they still experience pain.

Muslim scholars who forbid the consumption of beef based their argument on the assumption that stunning kills the animal before their jugular vein is slit. This is not true according to the report released by the general inspector.

Therefore, I believe animals slaughtered in the United States are halal to consume as long as you say the name of Allah before eating the meat.

Excerpted, with slight modifications, from: www.islamonline.net