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10 “‘Their Food’ Means Their Meat” Sunni Discourse on Non-Muslim Acts of Animal Slaughter The importance of food practices as a marker of Islamic identity, implicit in the Qur’anic passages we examined in the previous chapter, is made explicit in a nadith (an orally transmitted account of a statement) ascribed to the Prophet Munammad: “Whoever recites our prayers and worships in the direction of our qiblah and eats the meat of our slaughtered animals, that person is a Muslim who has the protection of God and the protection of His messenger.”1 This nadith, which appears as the epigraph to the present unit, encapsulates the definitional issues inherent in Islamic discussions regarding animal slaughter. Jews and Christians do not recite “our prayers” nor, following the so-called qiblah controversy of Munammad’s Medinan years, do they worship facing in the same direction as Muslims.2 These differences illustrate the fact that Jews and Christians do not belong to the Islamic category of Us. To the extent that these non-Muslims share Islamic standards with respect to animal slaughter, however, Jews and Christians are not simply Them either. We have seen, moreover, that the Qur’an explicitly treats meat prepared by Jews and Christians as equivalent to the meat of animals slaughtered by Muslims. What, then, is the nature of the relationship between People of the Book and Muslims, or between People of the Book and other non-Muslims? The style in which Islamic authorities think about Jews and Christians as “Them,” we will see, reflects the style in which these authorities define the meaning of “Us.” The relative otherness of different groups of outsiders rests at the heart of Islamic discourse regarding the permissibility of food associated with foreigners. Sunni authorities uniformly permit the consumption of meat from animals slaughtered by Jews and Christians, commonly referred to in Islamic legal literature as Scripturists (sing. kitābī).3 With only the rarest exception, however, Sunnis do not extend 144 this permission to meat prepared by other non-Muslims, often referred to generically as Magians (majūs) even though this term properly refers to Zoroastrians alone.4 The Sunni distinction between animal slaughter performed by Scripturists and animal slaughter performed by Magians reflects an embrace of the distinction between People of the Book and idolaters, expressed in such verses as Qur’an 5.5: Scripturists, according to Sunni authorities, are more similar to Muslims than are Magians. Most Shi‘i authorities, in contrast, forbid the consumption of all meat prepared by non-Muslims and even go so far as to treat nearly all food associated with foreigners as impure. These authorities equate Scripturists and Magians, emphasizing and elaborating upon Qur’anic rhetoric that highlights Jewish enmity toward the believers and associates People of the Book with idolaters. This divergence in Sunni and Shi‘i attitudes toward the food of Jews and Christians reflects not only a difference of opinion regarding the relationship that exists between Islam and earlier monotheistic traditions but also, and more fundamentally, a difference in the ways Sunnis and Shi‘is conceptualize Islam itself. As such, discourse about the food of foreigners constitutes one of the numerous fronts in the Sunni–Shi‘i war of ideas regarding authority within the Islamic world. Islamic law is based not only on the Qur’an but also and especially on the Sunnah , the practice of Munammad and those closest to him as reported through thousands of nadiths. Sunnis and Shi‘is, however, ascribe legitimacy to different collections of nadiths, stemming from different early Islamic figures. Shi‘is—properly speaking, the Shī‘at ‘Alī, partisans of ‘Alī—believe that authority to guide the Islamic community after the Prophet’s death rests in the hands of his descendants through his cousin and son-in-law ‘Alī b. Abī §ālib (d. 660), descendants known as the Imams. Shi‘i nadith collections and works of law consequently preserve the statements and practices of Munammad and the Imams. The majority Sunnis, in whose collections the nadith cited above appears, turn instead to nadiths associated with Munammad and Muslims who lived during the Prophet’s lifetime (Companions of the Prophet) or shortly thereafter (Successors). In doing so, Sunnis assert that authority rests in the practice of the Prophet’s community, as understood by its members ; for that reason, Sunnis are known formally as ahl al-sunnah wa-’l-jamā‘ah, those who follow the Sunnah and communal consensus. Although the primary division within Islamic law is...

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