Poetry, Prayer and the Muslim Vegan Imagination

Every religious argument travels in two vehicles at once. One is the legal vehicle: texts, chains of transmission, maxims, the slow work of deriving a ruling. The other is the imaginative vehicle: the image that lodges in the memory and will not leave. A jurist may tell you that an animal has a right to maintenance. A poet tells you that the milk in your cup was made by a mother for a child who was taken away. Both statements can be true. Only one of them tends to change what a person does on a Tuesday morning.

This page collects the verse that Muslim animal advocates most often carry with them, sets each piece in its context, and then does the less comfortable work of asking what it actually establishes. Some of it is a thousand years old and was controversial when it was written. Some of it was composed in the last decade by people who would describe themselves as ordinary Muslims who stopped being able to eat what they had always eaten. None of it is a ruling, and none of it should be quoted as though it were.

Why verse belongs in this argument

Islamic ethics has never been carried by fiqh manuals alone. Adab literature, Sufi poetry, sermon and song have done at least as much to shape how Muslims actually treat other creatures as any chapter on hunting or slaughter. When a grandmother tells a child that the Prophet ﷺ returned a bird's chicks to her nest, or that a woman entered the Fire for imprisoning a cat, she is not teaching a ruling. She is training an imagination — and the ruling, when the child later meets it, will be heard inside that trained imagination.

That is the honest reason verse appears here. It does not add a legal premise to the case made elsewhere on this site. It explains why the conclusion feels unavoidable to some Muslims and strained to others: the two groups are not only weighing texts differently, they are carrying different images.

Al-Ma'arri: “I no longer steal from nature”

Abu al-'Ala al-Ma'arri, born near Aleppo in 973 and blind from early childhood after smallpox, is among the most formidable poets in the Arabic language. In later life he withdrew from public life, refused meat, milk, eggs and honey, and defended the decision in verse when challenged. The most famous passage — a reply to a critic who had questioned his diet — runs, in English:

You are diseased in understanding and religion.
Come to me, that you may hear something of sound truth.
Do not unjustly eat fish the water has given up,
and do not desire as food the flesh of slaughtered animals,
or the white milk of mothers who intended its pure draught
for their young, not noble ladies.
And do not grieve the unsuspecting birds by taking eggs;
for injustice is the worst of crimes.
And spare the honey which the bees get industriously
from the flowers of fragrant plants;
for they did not store it that it might belong to others,
nor did they gather it for bounty and gifts.
I washed my hands of all this; and wish that I
perceived my way before my hair went gray.

Three features deserve attention, because they are more sophisticated than the poem's fame usually allows.

First, the argument is from justice, not purity. Al-Ma'arri does not say that flesh defiles the eater or that abstention purifies the soul, which is what one might expect from an ascetic. He says zulm — wrong, injustice — is the worst of crimes, and that each of these foods involves taking what was not made for us. That is a claim about the entitlement of the other creature. It sits remarkably close to what contemporary Muslim advocates argue from haqq and nafaqa.

Second, he names dairy and eggs, not only meat. The line about milk intended for the young and not for “noble ladies” is the oldest clear statement in Arabic of the argument this site treats at length on the dairy page: that milk has an intended recipient, and that the calf's claim on it is prior to ours. That the point was already available in the eleventh century matters, because it undercuts the common reply that objecting to dairy is a modern Western import.

Third, he includes honey and fish, which most later Muslim vegetarians did not. Honey in particular has a Qur'anic commendation behind it (16:68–69), and al-Ma'arri's refusal of it is the clearest signal that he was reasoning from a general principle about appropriation rather than assembling proof-texts.

The dispute over al-Ma'arri

It would be dishonest to quote the poem without the argument that surrounds its author. Al-Ma'arri was, in his own time and since, a deeply contested figure. He wrote satirically about religious authority, questioned received dogmas, and was read by some contemporaries as a sceptic who kept the form of piety while emptying it of content. Others read him as a severe believer whose quarrel was with clerics rather than with God. His Risalat al-Ghufran has been claimed by both camps. A statue of him in Syria was decapitated during the civil war, which tells you that the argument is not merely academic.

Kabir Sahib and the fast broken with blood

A second poem circulates constantly in Muslim vegan material, attributed to Kabir, the fifteenth-century weaver-poet of Banaras:

O Muslims, I see you fasting during the day,
but then to break your fast you slaughter cows at night.
At one end is devotion, at the other murder —
how can the Lord be pleased?
My friend, pray cut the throat of anger,
and slaughter the ravages of blind fury,
for he who slaughters the five passions —
lust, anger, greed, attachment and pride —
will surely see the Supreme Lord face to face.

The rhetorical move is the one that unsettles people most: it takes the language of slaughter and turns it inward. Cut the throat of anger. Slaughter pride. This is not a foreign idea in Islam — the Prophet ﷺ called the struggle against the self the greater striving in a widely quoted (and, in chain terms, weak) report, and the Qur'an itself says of sacrifice that “neither their flesh nor their blood reaches God, but your God-consciousness reaches Him” (22:37). Kabir is pressing a question the Qur'an has already opened.

A contemporary Muslim vegan poem

The most striking recent example is “Those Saintly Ideals” by Ali Almani, written for a Muslim audience and structured as a direct address. It opens with the basmala, invokes ar-Rahman, and asks whether those who call themselves servants of the Compassionate are in fact compassionate:

Ar-Rahman is compassionate, but is the Muslim?
How can we claim to be servants, how can we claim to be kind,
when heartfelt compassion is so hard to find?
… As a Mercy to all worlds was our Prophet sent,
and let me remind you, he was an animal friend.

It then moves through a sequence that will be familiar to anyone who has read the rest of this site — which is precisely what makes it useful. The poem argues, in order: that the Prophet ﷺ rebuked those who took a bird's young; that dairy involves the forced impregnation of a cow and the removal of her calf; that objections citing the goodness of milk do not answer the question of how it was obtained; that animal farming is a leading driver of climate change and deforestation; that this is sharr, harm, and a failure of the trust of khalifa; that God set a balance, al-mizan, which we are transgressing; that the Amazon burns to make pasture and that Muslim-majority countries import much of their meat from that trade; and that the woman punished for confining a cat should make us examine what we confine.

It closes on the two hadith that anchor the whole tradition: kindness to creatures is kindness to God, and whoever shows mercy to the creatures around them will be shown mercy.

Reading the poem's claims critically

A poem written to move people is still making factual and legal claims, and a reader who takes the subject seriously owes it the same scrutiny as a fatwa. Here is where its lines stand.

Two of those lines overreach. That matters more than it might seem. The argument that industrial animal agriculture is a grave environmental harm does not need an inflated percentage; the real figures, honestly stated, carry it. Every exaggerated number a Muslim advocate repeats gives a sceptical listener a reason to discard the rest — and in a discussion that turns on whether God's permission has been abused, credibility is not a side issue.

A prayer that honours all life

Alongside the poems, Muslim vegan networks circulate short supplications composed for the table. One, by the researcher Duke McLeod, runs:

This is a personal composition, not a transmitted du'a, and should never be offered as one. Muslims have always composed their own supplications in their own words; what is not permissible is to attach them to the Prophet ﷺ or to give them a ritual status they do not have. Read as what it is — one person's words before eating — it is unobjectionable, and its structure is recognisably Islamic: the basmala, the divine names, and a request to be made an instrument rather than a beneficiary.

Du'a, adab and the discipline of the table

There is a deeper point underneath the prayer. Islamic practice already surrounds eating with speech: the basmala before, alhamdulillah after, the prohibition on eating to excess, the recommendation to leave a third of the stomach empty, the sunnah of sharing food with a neighbour. The table is not a morally neutral space in Islam; it is one of the most heavily regulated spaces there is.

What the transmitted supplications do not include is any question about the life of the animal on the plate. That silence is not indifference — in a seventh-century Medinan household the animal's life was visible, and the slaughter was done by the person who had raised and fed it. The question did not need to be asked out loud. The argument of many Muslims today is that the question now has to be asked out loud precisely because the answer has been hidden from us, and that composing words for it is a way of restoring an awareness the original practice took for granted.

What poetry can and cannot establish

Here is the summary an honest reader should carry away. Poetry establishes that this conscience is old, that it has been voiced in Muslim languages and Muslim idioms, and that it is not an import. It gives a person language for something they already felt and could not say. It can make a hardened habit visible.

Poetry does not establish a ruling, does not authenticate a hadith, does not fix a percentage, and cannot substitute for the slower work of asking whether a specific practice violates a specific obligation. Al-Ma'arri's contested theology, Kabir's uncertain textual tradition and a modern poem's overstated climate figure are all reminders of the same thing: the case for mercy is strongest when it is made carefully, and weakest when it borrows authority it has not earned.

Read the verse. Let it do what verse does. Then take the argument itself back to the texts, to the evidence about how animals are actually kept, and to a scholar who knows your school and your circumstances.