In the name of allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful What is sin in Islam?

THE ANIMALS SLAUGHTERED BY THE PEOPLE OF THE BOOK

ARE SUCH ANIMALS LAWFUL OR UNLAWFUL MEAT ?
Introduction
The Quranic Restrictions on Eating Animal Flesh

• 
  Unclean Foods
  
• 
  Proper Slaughtering
  
• 
  The Condition of Taking Allah's Name
  

The Views of Jurists
The Weakness of the Shafi'ites View
The Animals Slaughtered by the people of the Book
Juristic Opinions

Introduction

The Jews have been, for the last two thousand years, living a scattered existence in the world.

But whatever the circumstances and the period, and whatever the country or society they have been living in, they have always maintained their identity. That which has enabled them to preserve their selfhood is the fact that most of them, if not all of them have consciously bound themselves to their religious code and reverenced their national traditions. Even when they were in a state of subjection, they got the dominant nation to permit them to observe their distinctive rituals and practices.

One such ritual is "kosher". The word does not apply merely to the animal the Jews slaughter for food but to anything involving a distinction between the Jewish and the non-Jewish food laws, as for example English bread and crackers, which are prepared by Jews themselves and called kosher, which implies that now these things do not contravene the Jewish laws. In every society that they have lived in, they have provisioned themselves in like manner, and it is their extreme care in this regard which has elicited for their laws of food deep respect from the other nations. If a person instructs an airline to provide him kosher on board, he is served with food which is placed in a tray, is properly covered, and bears the mark of a rabbi's seal; the seal is broken before the eyes of the passenger. Thus the Jews, who constitute a very small minority in any country, have not only themselves observed their practices, they have also made the rest of the world respect those practices.

And now, for a contrast, look at the condition of Muslims. Once arrived in the Western countries, most of them forget about the distinction between the clean and the unclean. There are Muslims who, on the strength of legal opinions given by certain Muslim scholars, consider it perfectly lawful to eat any kind of meat available in those countries, eon when the animal has not been slaughtered in the Islamic way. Even in cities containing twenty to forty thousand Muslims, no arrangement for the provision of lawful meat has been made. Nor has the right to slaughter animals in the Islamic way been asserted and secured. A good many 1, most of them Arabs, wrangle with the Muslims who wish to abide by the Islamic laws. They insist that if the lawfulness of the meat is in doubt, the eater may remove that doubt by taking Allah's name over the meat himself. I have been constantly receiving letters about such disputes, and reports tell me that the debate continues. I have, therefore, written this article which is being presented in pamphlet-form.

That Islam attaches great importance to the proper slaughtering of animals is evident from a tradition of the Holy Prophet. He said: "He who offers our prayer, faces (in prayer) the Qiblah (i.e. the Ka'aba), and eats of the animal slaughtered by us is a Muslim." In other words, slaughtering in the Islamic manner is, after the offering of the prayer and the turning of the face towards the Qiblah, the most significant mark that distinguishes a Muslim from a non-Muslim.