Belief and the shopping list

This lesson asks you to explain how influences across a lifetime, religious ones among them, affect people's food choices. The museum shows one tradition's way of sorting foods into lawful, unlawful and doubtful; your class adds other traditions and other influences. This is a religious classification, not dietary guidance. ¹

Look at the three groups the text names. Ask which foods are settled in advance, which are left open to dispute, and how a family might act on a doubtful case.

Read one division closely. In his commentary on the sixth hadith, Ibn Rajab divides rulings and things into what is purely lawful, what is purely unlawful, and matters that are doubtful between them ². In his view, the purely lawful is eating the good things of crops, fruits, and livestock ². The purely unlawful includes carrion, blood, the flesh of swine and wine ². The doubtful is what is disputed as to whether it is lawful or unlawful, such as horses, mules, donkeys, the lizard, and drinks whose large quantity intoxicates; he notes that this is the explanation of Ahmad, Ishaq, and others of the doubtful matters ². This is Ibn Rajab's classification of rulings and things, not a shopping list.

The record of the lawful gives from the Kuwaiti encyclopaedia of jurisprudence a different question: what is the default for things on which the sources are silent? The majority of the Hanafis and Shafi'is hold that the default is permission, some Hanafis suspend judgement, and some traditionists hold that the default is prohibition ^{3 4}. The encyclopaedia gives each view with its holders, and the museum chooses none. The records do not say which of these views would place a particular thing among Ibn Rajab's doubtful matters.

Ibn Rajab's division rests on his commentary on the sixth hadith ², and the museum's record does not say from which collection that hadith comes. He notes that this is the explanation of Ahmad, Ishaq and others ², so he attributes it to imams he names. The Kuwaiti encyclopaedia gives the positions of the Hanafis, the Shafi'is and the traditionists on what the sources leave silent ³. Both sources witness what scholars said about the lawful and the unlawful; neither says what a food does in the body, or what a particular household buys.

For Ibn Rajab the doubtful is what is disputed as to whether it is lawful or unlawful ², and in the Kuwaiti encyclopaedia scholars differ on the default for what the sources leave silent: permission, suspension or prohibition ³. Why would a researcher describing what a community avoids or buys need to ask which scholar or school it follows before using either text?

• The lawful, the unlawful and the doubtful: Ibn Rajab's division and its examples.
• Halal (the lawful): what the word means in jurisprudence, and the disagreement about the default for what the sources leave silent.
• Slaughter (dhaba'ih): the conditions under which the jurists make the flesh of a land animal lawful to eat.

Read the lawful, the unlawful and the doubtful. List the foods and drinks it names in each group, then add one influence on food choice from your own family or community that is not religious.