Meat must be slaughtered halal

Muslims affirm that meat is lawful to eat only if the animal is slaughtered according to the rite of dhabihah: a swift cut to the throat with a sharp blade, the name of God pronounced over it, the blood drained. Permitted land animals must be killed this way, and carrion and improperly slaughtered meat are forbidden. The Quran lists what is unlawful and permits, notably, the food of the People of the Book (5:3-5), a point that shapes debate over which non-Muslim meat qualifies as halal.

A widely cited hadith, preserved in Sahih Muslim on the authority of Shaddad ibn Aws, has the Prophet instruct that God has prescribed excellence (ihsan) in all things, including slaughter, so that the blade should be sharpened well beforehand and the animal spared unnecessary distress, including, in the reports built on this tradition, not sharpening the knife in the animal's sight or slaughtering one animal in view of another; jurists treat this instruction as integral to what makes dhabihah lawful, not merely a pious recommendation layered on top of a separate technical requirement. Contemporary jurists and halal certification bodies remain divided over mechanical slaughter and pre-slaughter stunning: some accept reversible stunning methods as compatible with dhabihah provided the fatal cut is still made on a living animal, while others reject any stunning outright, so the same imported meat can carry different certifications depending on which authority's ruling a given supplier follows.

Jurists explain the rite as combining mercy to the animal, the draining of prohibited blood, and the consecration of the act by God's name. The affirmation is universal across the schools, though they differ on questions such as machine slaughter and the meat of the People of the Book. It stands in evident parallel to Jewish shechita, with which it shares the throat-cut and blood-draining, while differing in that Islam requires the invocation of God at the moment of slaughter and does not employ a separate class of trained ritual slaughterer in the way rabbinic law does.

That difference in personnel runs deeper than the cut itself: where Jewish law licenses a single trained shochet and follows the cut with a formal inspection for internal defects before the meat may be sold as kosher, Islamic practice names no equivalent examined office, so the same standard of care the tradition asks of a slaughterer falls to any competent believer performing the cut rather than to a licensed specialist checking afterward. What one tradition secures institutionally, through a trained office and a formal post mortem inspection, the other leaves to the individual slaughterer's own skill, intention, and the words spoken at the moment of killing.