What a person eats: illness and the grades of eating

This lesson asks you to evaluate how personal and societal factors, such as illness, affect what people eat, and to explain how diet requirements vary with lifestyle. The museum offers two records of rules about eating, one on diet in illness and one on the grades of eating by need. Nutrients, energy needs and the chemistry of a balanced diet are for your class to bring. The records are history and law, not dietary or medical advice; someone who is ill or has trouble eating should follow a doctor's advice. ¹

List each reason the records give for eating more, less or something different. Sort the reasons into personal ones and ones that belong to the community, and add one more of each from your own life.

Read one entry of the record on eating slowly. The Kuwaiti jurists' encyclopaedia sets out grades of eating by need: eating is obligatory up to what keeps a person alive, required for standing prayer and obligatory fasts, recommended for earning and learning, permitted up to satiety, and forbidden beyond satiety or where it is known to damage the stomach ². It adds that eating a little beyond satiety is disliked ². In the record on diet in illness, hamiyya lexically means prohibition, to keep the sick from what harms him, and it is a lawful form of treatment ³. Each grade is tied to a reason: staying alive, standing prayer and fasting, earning and learning. These grades are the encyclopaedia's legal classification, not dietary advice.

The encyclopaedia reports disagreement about eating beyond need and about the fasting guest. On eating for pleasure, some held that one should not eat for pleasure; the sound view, it says, is that it is permitted for thanks and for strength in good works ². On the wedding feast, a guest who is fasting voluntarily is recommended to break the fast by the Shafi'is and Hanbalis, to honour the host, while the Hanafis and Malikis accept a prayer for the host ^{4 5}. Each view is attributed as the record gives it, and the record does not decide between them.

Both records rest on one source, the Kuwaiti jurists' encyclopaedia, which reports what scholars hold and rule; it witnesses rulings and sayings, not measurements ^{2 3}. For diet in illness, the record cites a hadith that God sent a cure for every disease except old age, and says that Ibn al-Qayyim takes as its root a Quranic ruling, the narration of Umm al-Mundhir and a report about Umar ³; it does not name the collection of the hadith. It says that diet must follow the principles of medicine and sound experience ⁶, and names no physician and no study. Ask who is credited with each statement, and what is left without a name.

The encyclopaedia classifies eating by need, and makes it forbidden where it is known to damage the stomach ²; for diet in illness it says that diet must follow the principles of medicine and sound experience ⁶. Take a position on which questions a legal classification of eating can answer and which need another kind of evidence, and answer the strongest objection to your position: if the scholars classify eating in grades, why must medicine be consulted at all?

• Eating: the grades of eating by need, the manners of eating, and eating from a sacrifice or at a feast.
• Diet in illness: the word in the lexicon, and what the record says of Ibn al-Qayyim and the principles of medicine.
• The physician: what the TDV encyclopaedia says about treatment beginning with diet and regimen.

Read the record on eating and match each grade to a situation, such as illness or fasting, then add a situation that a person with a different lifestyle might meet.