Halal

The Quran names the forbidden categories directly: carrion, blood, the flesh of swine, and anything dedicated to a name other than God's at the time of slaughter. Later jurisprudence extends the list to alcohol and to any intoxicant, reasoned by analogy from the Quran's prohibition of wine, and to predatory animals and birds of prey in most legal schools, on the strength of prophetic reports rather than the Quran itself.

Everything not named as forbidden is treated as permitted by default, which is the sense of halal itself: the term marks the default state of food, and haram marks the narrow set of exceptions cut out of it. This is why Islamic dietary law reads as a shorter list of prohibitions rather than a long list of permissions, unlike the more exhaustively enumerated categories of kashrut in Jewish law, which the Quran itself treats as a stricter code imposed on the Israelites rather than a model binding on Muslims.

Necessity narrows the prohibitions further: classical jurists agree that a forbidden food may be eaten to avoid starvation, on the reasoning that preserving life outweighs the general rule. The same logic underlies most disagreements between schools of law, which concern edge cases such as animals of the sea, rather than the core list itself.

Dhabihah is the method, not just the animal. A sharp blade cuts the throat in one continuous stroke, severing the trachea, the esophagus and the jugular veins and carotid arteries, so that the blood, which is itself forbidden as food, drains from the body before the meat is handled further. The slaughterer invokes the name of God over the animal, and classical law requires the slaughterer to be a Muslim or, in most schools, a Jew or Christian, on the reasoning that the food of the People of the Book is generally lawful to Muslims.

Mechanized slaughter and the modern halal certification industry have made the details contested rather than settled. Disputes among contemporary scholars and certifying bodies concern whether stunning before the cut is compatible with the requirement that the animal be alive at the moment of slaughter, and whether machine cutting satisfies the requirement for an intentional, named act performed by a person. Certification bodies differ by country and by school of law, and no single global standard governs the label.

The same method, applied to the same animals for closely related reasons, underlies Jewish shechita; the two traditions differ mainly in who may perform the cut and in the blessing or invocation that must accompany it.