Animal Rights in Islamic Law

In 2013, two scholars working in Qom — Mohsen Javadi, a professor of philosophy at the University of Qom, and Asghar Masoudi, a graduate of the University of Qur'an and Hadith in Qom who now heads the Kabul branch of al-Mustafa International University — published an academic article in Persian titled "Huquq-e Heyvanat az Manzar-e Islam," "Animal Rights from the Islamic Perspective," in the journal Pazhuhesh-ha-ye Akhlaqi (Ethical Research), volume 4, issue 2, Winter 1392 in the Iranian solar calendar (2013–14 CE), pages 21 to 48. It has, so far as this site is aware, not previously been summarised for an English-reading audience. This page presents it in full, as the anchor essay for the comparative section, and reads it the way this section reads everything: attributed, weighed honestly, and never mistaken for a fatwa or a verdict binding on readers outside the tradition that produced it.

Provenance: a paper from Qom, reasoning across both corpora

Before any of its arguments are worth engaging, the article's provenance needs to be stated plainly, because it changes how an English reader should weigh what follows. This is a Persian-language academic paper, not a hadith collection and not a ruling issued by a marja' or a fatwa council. It was written and published within a Shi'i, specifically Qom, scholarly milieu, and it draws heavily on Twelver Shi'i fiqh and hadith literature: Wasa'il al-Shi'a, Bihar al-Anwar, Jawahir al-Kalam, and Nahj al-Balagha, the collection of sermons, letters, and sayings attributed to 'Ali ibn Abi Talib that occupies a central place in Shi'i devotional and legal life but is not treated by Sunni scholarship as a hadith corpus in the same sense. Alongside this Imami material, the authors also draw on Sunni-transmitted collections — Kanz al-'Ummal, Abu Dawud, al-Bayhaqi, Ibn Sa'd's Tabaqat, and al-Damiri's zoological compendium Hayat al-Hayawan — and on shared Qur'anic material that belongs to no school in particular.

What this means practically is that the article is best read as two interwoven strands rather than one undifferentiated argument. Where it reports a Prophetic saying found in Sunni collections — the tethered camel, the woman punished over the cat, the water given to a thirsty cat before wudu — a Sunni reader is on familiar ground, encountering material that also appears, in some cases, in Bukhari and Muslim. Where it reports a ruling from al-Tusi's al-Mabsut, al-Najafi's Jawahir al-Kalam, or a saying attributed to Imam al-Sadiq or Imam al-Rida, a Sunni reader is encountering the apparatus of a legal school — Twelver Ja'fari fiqh — that reasons from its own hadith corpus, its own chains of transmission through the Imams, and its own internal methodology. Neither strand should be silently converted into the other. This page will say, at each point, which kind of source is doing the work, because that is the only honest way to present a text written from inside one tradition but reaching for material shared with another.

It is also worth saying what kind of writing this is. Javadi and Masoudi are not issuing rulings; they are assembling and interpreting rulings and reports that others have issued, in the register of an academic ethics journal. Their own stated keywords are rights, animals, Islam, and environmental ethics — the vocabulary of applied ethics, not of jurisprudence in the narrow sense, even though a large part of the article's evidentiary weight comes from fiqh texts. And at no point does the article argue that eating meat, drinking milk, riding animals, or performing animal sacrifice is wrong. It assumes all of these as lawful background and asks a narrower, and in some ways more demanding, question: given that these uses are lawful, what exactly is owed to the animal in the course of them.

Three framing points before any ruling

Javadi and Masoudi open with three clarifications that shape everything that follows, and it is worth taking them in the order they give them, because each heads off a natural misreading.

The first is that "animal rights" in their usage does not mean rights identical or equivalent to human rights. Animals, they observe, do not require the elaborate social and political structures that human rights protect — due process, political representation, freedom of expression in the human sense. What animals need, and what the authors take Islamic sources to secure for them, is freedom of movement, adequate light, enough space to express their natural behaviours, natural and appropriate food, and the company of their own kind. The human duty correlative to these needs is essentially negative in the first instance: refrain from trampling on what an animal naturally requires to live as the kind of creature it is. It is worth noting, as an aside the article does not itself develop at length, how closely this list maps onto the vocabulary of modern welfare science — freedom of movement, absence of unnecessary confinement, opportunity for natural behaviour — a resonance this site's own essays on industrial farming return to elsewhere.

The second framing point is that respecting an animal's rights does not require liking the animal. Javadi and Masoudi draw the analogy to human rights: a person is obliged to respect the rights of other human beings whether or not any personal affection exists between them. The same structure holds for animals. Islam does, separately and additionally, urge compassion and kindness towards animals as a virtue — much of the hadith material below goes beyond bare obligation into recommended tenderness — but the baseline duty not to harm or neglect an animal does not wait on whether a person happens to find the animal endearing.

The third point is the one that gives the whole article its structure: animal rights are, in the authors' phrase, essentially rights of protection, because animals cannot claim their own rights. A human being who is wronged can, in principle, object, seek redress, forgive, or pursue a claim. An animal can do none of these things. It cannot articulate a grievance to a court, cannot waive what is owed to it, and cannot forgive the person who withholds it. Human beings are therefore placed under an obligation to act on the animal's behalf — not as an act of charity extended at will, but as a duty whose very existence is explained by the animal's incapacity to assert it for itself. Everything that follows in the article, from the doctrine that animal rights cannot be waived to the specific content of nafaqa, traces back to this third point.

The central argument: rights that cannot be waived

The most distinctive claim in the article, and the one most worth foregrounding for an English readership that may not have encountered it before, is the argument that animal rights are, in the authors' Persian phrase, ghayr qabil-e isqat — not susceptible to being waived or extinguished. The structure of the argument is straightforward once stated. Human rights, generally speaking, admit of waiver: if I owe you a debt, or have wronged you in some way, you can, as the rights-holder, choose to forgive me, release the claim, or decline to pursue it. That capacity to forgive is itself part of what it means to hold a right as a competent moral agent. An animal has no such capacity. It cannot forgive the owner who fails to feed it, cannot release the herdsman from the duty to water it, cannot decide that a wrong done to it no longer matters. Because forgiveness is unavailable to the animal in principle, not merely as a matter of practical inconvenience, the human obligation towards it cannot be discharged by anything other than actually performing it. There is no equivalent of asking forgiveness and being let off; the debt survives until it is paid, because it is a kind of debt that has no mechanism, on the animal's side, for being written off.

Javadi and Masoudi connect this argument directly to a widely reported saying — attested in Sunni-transmitted collections such as Muttaqi al-Hindi's Kanz al-'Ummal (9/66, no. 24973) and repeated in the Shi'i compilation Mizan al-Hikma (3/1344, no. 4520) — in which the Prophet is reported to have said: were the wrong you do to animals forgiven you, much would be forgiven you. On a first reading this looks like a straightforward statement about the gravity of wronging animals. The authors' point is sharper than that. The saying, read against the waiver argument, implies that wrongs against animals occupy an unusually severe category precisely because there is no one on the animal's side who could pronounce that forgiveness in the way a wronged human being could. If such forgiveness were available — the hadith's conditional is doing real work — then a great deal would be forgiven; the implication carried by the conditional is that this particular channel of forgiveness does not, in fact, exist, and that the debt therefore has to be met by conduct rather than absolved by pardon. The argument is not that animals are owed more than humans in an absolute sense; it is that the route by which human debts are so often settled — an aggrieved party's forgiveness — is structurally closed off when the aggrieved party is an animal, which makes actual performance the only avenue left.

Nafaqa: maintenance as an owed obligation

The concrete content of what is owed to an animal, in the article's presentation, is organised chiefly under the concept of nafaqa — maintenance, in the sense familiar from Islamic family law's treatment of a husband's maintenance obligation to a wife, but here extended to the relationship between an owner and an animal in their keeping. Nafaqa, on the authors' reading of the Imami fiqh literature, is not a loose exhortation to kindness but a specific, owed obligation with definite content: food, water, shelter, and veterinary treatment when the animal is ill or injured.

Shahid al-Thani's Masalik al-Afham (1/305) states plainly that included within the ruling on an animal's maintenance is "such medicine as it requires for illness" — veterinary care is not an optional extra but part of the same obligation that covers feeding. Shelter receives the same treatment: al-Najafi's Jawahir al-Kalam (31/395) ranks a resting place alongside food and water as a component of nafaqa, and Shahid al-Thani's al-Rawda al-Bahiyya (5/482) states the obligation in terms that deliberately anticipate an objection — maintenance including a resting place and a stable befitting the animal's condition is owed "even if the animal is of no use or is on the point of perishing." An animal that will never again be ridden, milked, or put to work, or one that is dying, does not thereby lose its claim to shelter; the obligation is not contingent on the animal's continuing usefulness to its owner.

The standard against which adequacy is measured is not fixed abstractly but follows local custom, 'urf, and is understood to vary by time and place — what counts as adequate shelter or feed for a working animal in one climate and economy need not be identical to what counts as adequate elsewhere. Al-Muhaqqiq al-Hilli's Shara'i' al-Islam (2/103) adds a further specific rule: a trustee holding an animal in trust may not put it out of the house except from necessity, and separating incompatible animals — the article gives the example of not housing goats together with ewes — is itself treated as part of the duty of proper care.

Perhaps the single most striking extension of nafaqa in the article is al-Tusi's ruling in al-Mabsut (6/47), stated with a bluntness the authors quote directly: if someone owns a beast, its maintenance is upon him, whether its flesh may be lawfully eaten or not; bird and non-bird are alike, "because they have hurma," inviolability. The obligation to feed, water, and shelter an animal in one's possession does not depend on whether that animal's meat would ever be lawful to consume. A dog, for instance, whose flesh is not eaten, generates the same maintenance obligation in its owner as a sheep does. The ground given — hurma, a kind of inviolability attaching to the living creature as such — is doing real conceptual work here: it locates the source of the obligation in the animal's status as a living, sentient being, rather than in its economic utility or its eventual role as food.

A claim of God: the deposited animal

The article pushes the nafaqa obligation one step further by asking who, exactly, is entitled to release an owner or custodian from it. The test case is the deposited animal: a person hands an animal to another as a trustee, wadi'a, and then instructs the trustee not to feed or water it. Two major Imami sources address this directly. Al-Najafi, in the section of Jawahir al-Kalam dealing with deposit (27/111), rules that such an instruction may not be obeyed — feeding and watering the animal remain obligatory regardless of what the owner says, because, in al-Najafi's words, a haqq Allah, a claim of God, must be observed. Al-Muhaqqiq al-Hilli's Shara'i' al-Islam (2/103) reaches the same conclusion.

The significance of classifying the obligation as a haqq Allah rather than merely a haqq al-nas, a claim of a human party, is precisely that it explains why the owner's own instruction cannot lift it. If the duty to feed the animal were owed only to the owner, the owner's waiver would end the matter — this is exactly how most ordinary contractual obligations work. Because the duty is instead understood as a claim of God, it survives the owner's attempt to release the trustee from it; God, on this analysis, is a party to the obligation whom neither the owner nor the trustee is in a position to release. Al-Najafi goes on to say that there is no disagreement on this ruling and that consensus, ijma', could be claimed for it. It should be reported exactly as that: al-Najafi's claim of consensus within the Imami school, on a point of Imami fiqh, and not evidence of a pan-Islamic or cross-madhhab agreement. A Sunni reader encountering this argument for the first time is encountering a piece of Twelver legal reasoning about the category of haqq Allah, applied here in a way that may or may not have close parallels worked out with the same vocabulary in the four Sunni schools; the article does not claim that it does, and neither should this page.

The hard cases: fodder, planks, and thirsty animals

Some of the most revealing material in the article comes not from general statements of principle but from the hard cases jurists worked through, because the reasoning offered to resolve a genuine conflict of interests shows what is actually doing the work behind a rule.

The first is the case of seized fodder. 'Allama al-Hilli's Qawa'id al-Ahkam addresses a situation in which an animal's owner has no fodder for it, and the only available supply belongs to someone who refuses to sell. The ruling permits the owner to compel the seller and take the fodder, on the same footing as a starving person taking food to preserve their own life. Fadil al-Hindi's Kashf al-Litham (7/612) supplies the reason, and it is worth quoting in full because of how directly it states the underlying principle: the human being and the animal, he writes, "share in the inviolability of the spirit and in the necessity of averting harm." The animal's life is being treated, for the purposes of this ruling, as generating a claim of the same structural kind — inviolability of life — that a starving human being's own life generates.

The second case concerns a usurped plank used in building a ship. Several sources — Tadhkirat al-Fuqaha, Jami' al-Maqasid, Masalik al-Afham, and al-Rawda al-Bahiyya — hold that a usurped plank must ordinarily be removed and returned to its rightful owner, even at cost to the ship, unless removing it would destroy an inviolable life. If an animal belonging to someone other than the usurper is aboard and would die as a result of the plank's removal, removal is not obligatory. Al-Muhaqqiq al-Ardabili is cited as holding that there is no disagreement on this point, because the animal's life is inviolable whether the animal belongs to the usurper himself or to an innocent third party — ownership by the wrongdoer does not diminish the animal's own claim to have its life protected.

The third, and perhaps most pointed, case concerns water scarce enough that it will suffice only for ritual purification or for an animal's thirst, not both. The ruling in this situation is that a person performs tayammum, the dry ablution otherwise reserved for genuine absence of water, and gives the actual water to the thirsty animal. What makes the case instructive is the dispute recorded over why. Shahid al-Thani grounds the permission in fear of thirst for an inviolable soul, explicitly extending that description to an animal. Others — al-Muhaqqiq al-Hilli, the author of al-Madarik (al-Musawi al-'Amili), and the muhaddith al-Bahrani — ground the same permission instead in the animal's need and in averting the owner's financial loss, rather than in any claim about the inviolability of its life as such. The ruling is identical across both explanations; the reasoning behind it is not, and the difference matters, because a rule grounded in the animal's own inviolable life is doing different conceptual work than a rule grounded in protecting an owner's property interest, even where the two happen to converge on the same practical outcome in this instance.

A closely related and more contested case makes the same divide visible in sharper relief. Shahid al-Thani, in Masalik al-Afham (12/120), held that if water suffices for only one of two animals — the article's example is a dog and a sheep — the sheep takes precedence. Al-Najafi, in Jawahir al-Kalam (36/436), objects, and argues the opposite conclusion could equally be reached: one might say the dog should have priority, since the sheep, unlike the dog, can in any case be slaughtered and its meat put to use, whereas the dog has no such alternative recourse. The disagreement between two major Imami jurists over which animal's life should be preferred when both cannot be saved is presented in the article, and should be presented here, as a genuine and unresolved dispute within the tradition rather than as evidence of one settled Shi'i position.

Endowing fodder: waqf for animals

A quieter but still telling piece of evidence for the seriousness with which the fiqh literature treats animal welfare is al-Hilli's ruling in Tadhkirat al-Fuqaha (2/430) on endowments, waqf. Having affirmed the validity of endowments established for the service of the Ka'ba and the shrines, al-Hilli goes on to rule valid an endowment established for fodder for beasts in the path of God. A waqf, to be valid, must have a praiseworthy object — an endowment cannot ordinarily be established for a purpose the law regards as trivial or objectionable. By classing the feeding of animals among the objects for which a person may permanently set aside property in perpetuity, alongside the upkeep of sacred sites, al-Hilli is making a statement about the standing of that purpose within the scale of praiseworthy acts recognised by the law, not merely permitting a private kindness.

What is forbidden: striking, branding, mutilation, and more

Alongside the positive obligation of maintenance, the article catalogues a long list of specific prohibitions, most attached to Prophetic reports found in Sunni-transmitted collections, some to reports and rulings specific to the Imami corpus.

Striking an animal, and especially striking its face, is repeatedly singled out. Seeing a donkey branded on the face, the Prophet is reported to have said, "Have you not heard that I have cursed whoever brands an animal's face or strikes its face?" (Abu Dawud 3/26, no. 2564); marking for identification is instead directed to the ear or another part of the body, and al-Tusi's al-Mabsut (1/261) specifies that branding, where done at all, should be on the strongest and toughest part of the body, free of wool or hair, so the animal is not needlessly harmed. Imami reports add that al-Sadiq permitted marking other than on the face and instructed a companion, Yunus b. Ya'qub, to mark a sheep on the ear (Wasa'il al-Shi'a 11/485). Al-Kulayni's al-Kafi (6/538) gives a distinct theological reason for the prohibition on striking an animal's face: "for every creature glorifies God."

Mutilation is condemned in the strongest terms the article records: "God has cursed whoever mutilates an animal" is attributed in Kanz al-'Ummal (9/66) and Mizan al-Hikma (3/1344, no. 4522). This wording should be treated as attributed rather than as a formally graded, unquestioned text — the article itself notes that this Persian source gives the saying firmer sourcing than some earlier popular treatments do, which is itself a signal that some caution about the precise wording is appropriate. The Qur'an is read alongside this material at 4:119, where Satan boasts that he will command people to slit the ears of cattle and alter God's creation — the authors take this as the Qur'an itself classing acts of mutilation as ugly and satanic.

Frightening an animal unnecessarily, cursing it, and verbally abusing it are all treated as forbidden. 'Ali's letter of instruction to his agents states plainly, "do not startle or frighten any beast" (Nahj al-Balagha, letter 25). A separate Imami report states that God has cursed the one who curses beasts (al-Saduq, Man la yahduruhu al-faqih 2/188), and al-Tabarsi's Majma' al-Bayan supplies the reasoning: a curse is properly a request that punishment and estrangement from mercy fall upon someone who deserves it, and an animal does not deserve it — the prohibition follows from what a curse actually is, not merely from a general rule against harsh speech.

Deceiving an animal is treated as a distinct wrong: a man who lured his own animal by pretending to hold barley or salt in an empty vessel, then seized it once it approached, is reported to have displeased the Prophet, who asked him why he had lied to the animal and told him he should not have deceived it. Castration and the setting of animals to fight one another are both disapproved: the Prophet is reported to have forbidden castrating horses, sheep and cockerels, and Imam al-Baqir is reported to have disliked both sterilising animals and setting them against each other in fights (al-Barqi, al-Mahasin 2/634). Destroying birds' nests is prohibited, illustrated by the report of the Prophet's displeasure on finding an ants' nest the Companions had burned — "None should punish with fire but the Lord of fire" — and by reports in which a mother bird's chicks are taken and the Prophet insists they be returned to where they were found, reasoning explicitly that God is more merciful to His servants than a mother bird is to her young. Separating a mother from her young more generally, and milking an animal dry so that nothing is left for its offspring, or milking with long, uncut nails that scratch or wound the udder, are all condemned in reports the article collects — including the specific instruction given to Sawada b. al-Rabi' to trim nails before milking so as not to injure the animal (Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqat 7/48, 184).

The beating reports, read against each other

One of the more methodologically interesting passages in the article concerns a pair of reports on beating that appear, on their face, to point in opposite directions, and the article's handling of this tension is worth reproducing carefully rather than smoothing over. One version, found in al-Kafi (6/539, h.12) and in Bihar al-Anwar (64/214, h.24), instructs: strike animals for balking or stubbornness ('ithar) but not for shying (nifar). A report from al-Sadiq recorded in Wasa'il al-Shi'a (11/488, b.13, h.4) states, on the article's account, the reverse — and adds a reason: "for they see what you do not see," implying that an animal's apparent skittishness may be a response to something real that a human handler cannot perceive, which would make punishing it for shying a punishment for a justified reaction rather than a fault.

Two later scholars are recorded as offering different reconciliations of the tension. Majlisi suggests the two reports are simply addressed to different situations, each valid in its own context rather than in flat contradiction. Al-Hurr al-'Amili reconciles them differently, reading the prohibition in both as ultimately directed against excess — the permission to strike for balking is not a licence for severity, and the prohibition on striking for shying is a specific application of a more general caution against beating an animal for something that may not be its fault. Javadi and Masoudi's own conclusion, stated plainly and worth quoting as their considered judgement rather than as a report they are merely relaying, is that although the wording idribuha, strike them, shows that striking is in some circumstances permitted, this is not a licence to beat animals, and no beating of animals is recorded in the practice of the great figures of the religion. The gap between a bare grammatical permission and an actual pattern of conduct is, in their reading, the more reliable guide to what the tradition actually endorses.

'Ali's zakat instructions, and an inference the article does not make

Among the Imami-specific material, the article gives particular weight to 'Ali's instructions to his zakat collectors, transmitted in Nahj al-Balagha. The instructions are detailed and practical: do not take an aged, broken-legged, sick, or defective animal from a payer of zakat; entrust the collected animals to a kind, trustworthy, God-fearing agent who will not be harsh with them, tire them, or exhaust them; do not separate a she-camel from her young; do not milk her dry so that nothing is left for her calf; do not tire her by riding; be just between her and the other camels; rest the weary one; drive gently the one unable to walk; give the animals time at watering places; do not drag them past pastures onto the road; let them rest and graze, so that they arrive at their destination strong rather than exhausted — conduct which, 'Ali says, will increase the collector's reward and bring him nearer to right guidance.

Javadi and Masoudi draw out a specific observation about this material that is worth stating in their own terms before drawing anything further from it: 'Ali is most insistent, they note, about animals held by agents who do not themselves own them and gain nothing personally from their good condition — zakat animals temporarily in the hands of a collector, who has no long-term stake in the herd's welfare and every short-term incentive to move quickly and handle roughly. Precisely because such animals are most exposed to neglect by someone with no ownership interest in their long-term wellbeing, 'Ali's instructions concentrate their most detailed care there.

It should be said clearly, as an inference this page is drawing and the article itself does not draw, why plant-based readers in particular find this structural point suggestive when set alongside industrial animal agriculture. The pattern 'Ali is guarding against — an animal's welfare entrusted to a party who does not own it, is paid to move it through a system quickly, and bears no lasting stake in its condition — has an obvious structural resemblance to much of the labour arrangement inside modern industrial farming and transport, where workers, contractors, and intermediate handlers frequently have neither ownership of the animals nor any economic interest beyond throughput. That resemblance is a modern reader's inference from the logic of 'Ali's instruction, not a claim the seventh-century instruction itself makes about industrial systems that did not exist, and it should not be presented as though the source text anticipated factory farming. It is, at most, a case where an old piece of practical wisdom about misaligned incentives turns out to describe a problem that recurs in a very different setting.

The six rights of a mount

The article gives one especially compact and usable organising device: a report, transmitted through al-Sakuni from Imam al-Sadiq, from his fathers, from 'Ali, from the Prophet, listing six rights a riding or working animal holds against its owner (al-Barqi, al-Mahasin 2/633; al-Tusi, Tahdhib al-Ahkam 6/164; Mizan al-Hikma 3/1344, no. 4524):

1. Feed it when you dismount, rather than leaving it unfed while you attend to yourself.
2. Offer it water whenever you pass water, rather than passing it by.
3. Do not strike its face, for it glorifies its Lord.
4. Do not sit on its back while it is stationary, except when travelling in God's path.
5. Do not burden it beyond its capacity.
6. Do not make it walk beyond its strength.

As a chain of transmission, this report belongs to the Imami hadith corpus and should be identified as such rather than presented as a universally agreed Prophetic text; a Sunni reader will not find this exact isnad in the Sunni collections, even where the substance of several of its six points — not overburdening an animal, feeding and watering it promptly, not striking its face — recurs independently in material transmitted through Sunni chains, such as the tethered camel reports and the branding prohibition discussed above. The list is nonetheless a genuinely useful organising device for comparative purposes precisely because its individual components are, in substance if not in isnad, so widely shared.

What the article establishes, and what it does not

Javadi and Masoudi's own conclusion, stated in summary form, is that Islam gives animal rights considerable weight, situates them among the claims of God rather than merely of the owner, and holds everyone answerable before God for how they treat the animals in their care. Because such rights can only be discharged by performance and never by an animal's forgiveness, the Prophetic saying about forgiveness withheld is, on their reading, better understood — its severity is not rhetorical excess but a precise description of a structural fact. The exemplary figures of the tradition, in their account, did not merely state these rules but modelled a practical pattern of conduct consistent with them, and the tradition attaches otherworldly reward and punishment to how this conduct is or is not carried out. The concern, they stress again at the end, is general: it extends to animals whose meat is unlawful to eat and to animals close to death, and the sources they have assembled consistently give reasons, not only bare rulings — hurma, glorification of God, the shared inviolability of living spirits — which is itself, in their view, evidence of a considered rather than an arbitrary body of law.

An honest assessment for this site's purposes has to hold two things together. First, what the article does establish, on the evidence it presents, is substantial: a considered case, drawing on both Imami fiqh apparatus and shared Prophetic material, that animal welfare in Islamic law is not an afterthought or a matter of pure supererogation but is treated, in significant strands of the juristic literature, as an owed and in some formulations divinely claimed obligation, with specific, enforceable-in-principle content covering food, water, shelter, and medical care, and with a wide set of concrete prohibitions on cruelty, deception, and unnecessary harm.

Second, and just as importantly, what the article does not establish needs to be said with equal clarity. It is not a vegetarian or vegan argument, and nothing in this page should be read as suggesting otherwise. Every fiqh case it discusses — the deposited animal, the seized fodder, the usurped plank, the thirsty animal, the mount and its six rights — takes for granted a world in which people own animals, ride them, milk them, and eventually slaughter and eat some of them, and the article's argument operates entirely within that assumed framework, asking only how animals must be treated within it. Plant-based readers who find the article's structural arguments — rights that cannot be waived, maintenance as a claim of God, the misaligned-incentive problem visible in 'Ali's zakat instructions — suggestive for a critique of industrial systems are drawing their own inference, clearly flagged as such above, and not reporting the article's own conclusion.

For Sunni readers specifically, the honest thing to say is that the Imami fiqh apparatus deployed throughout much of the article — the specific categorisation of an obligation as haqq Allah in a deposit case, the citation of Jawahir al-Kalam and Wasa'il al-Shi'a as primary legal authorities, the standing given to Nahj al-Balagha — will be unfamiliar territory, tied to a legal methodology and a set of authoritative texts that the four Sunni madhhabs do not share and do not draw on in the same way. That unfamiliarity is real and should not be minimised. What is not unfamiliar, and what carries across without needing translation into another school's vocabulary, is the Prophetic material: the tethered camel, the woman and the cat, the water given before wudu, the prohibition on striking an animal's face, the instruction not to deceive an animal, the saying about forgiveness withheld. That material sits in Sunni-transmitted collections independently of anything Twelver jurisprudence goes on to build with it, and it is the strongest common ground this page has to offer a reader from either tradition. Equally, it should not be assumed that the four Sunni schools would reach identical conclusions to one another, or to the Imami rulings surveyed here, on every hard case discussed above; Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali jurists each have their own literature on animal welfare and their own internal disagreements, which this article, being a Shi'i-milieu paper primarily interested in its own tradition's fiqh, does not undertake to survey, and which this page does not claim to have surveyed either.

The authorities the letter names: Tusi, Hilli, Najafi, Tabataba'i

The anonymous open letter to Shia Muslims on the livestock industry does not rely only on Qur'anic verses and disputed hadith. It also names a short list of classical and modern Twelver authorities as backing for the claim that the prohibition on harming animals runs deep in the school's own fiqh — a list that overlaps closely with the material this page has already surveyed from Javadi and Masoudi, and is worth setting out directly, with the same care about what each source actually supports.

The letter cites Shaykh al-Tusi's al-Mabsut for the ruling, already discussed above, that an owner is obliged to maintain an animal in his possession regardless of whether its flesh may lawfully be eaten, on the ground that the animal possesses hurma, inviolability. It cites al-'Allama al-Hilli's Tadhkirat al-Fuqaha for the validity of an endowment (waqf) established for animal fodder — a ruling this page has already traced to al-Hilli directly above — as evidence that classical Twelver law treated the feeding of animals as a praiseworthy object in its own right, on a par with endowments for sacred sites. It cites Muhammad Hasan al-Najafi's Jawahir al-Kalam, the major nineteenth-century Imami legal compendium already central to this page's discussion of the deposited animal and the haqq Allah argument, as further authority for treating an animal's maintenance as a claim that even its own owner cannot waive.

The fourth name the letter reaches for is different in kind from the first three: 'Allama Tabataba'i, the twentieth-century author of al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur'an, one of the most substantial modern Shi'i Qur'an commentaries. The letter attributes to Tabataba'i the view that animals hold rights that people have not properly grasped — a striking, modern-sounding formulation if accurately reported. This site has not independently verified the precise wording or location of that statement within al-Mizan's many volumes, and readers should treat the attribution with the same caution applied throughout this page to claims this site cannot check directly: it may well capture something genuine in Tabataba'i's exegetical treatment of verses such as 6:38 on animal communities, but it should be read as the letter's own characterisation until a specific citation can be confirmed.

What matters most, though, is not whether each attribution is exact, but what these four names are actually being used to establish. Read fairly and in their own context, none of al-Tusi, al-Hilli, al-Najafi or Tabataba'i is arguing, or has ever been understood by mainstream Twelver scholarship to argue, that eating meat, drinking milk or keeping animals for produce is unlawful. What their rulings and commentary establish, on the evidence this page and the Javadi–Masoudi study have both surveyed, is a real and serious prohibition on causing animals unnecessary pain, neglect or cruelty within a framework that continues to assume lawful use throughout. The letter is entitled to draw on these authorities for the welfare case, which they genuinely support; it should not be read, and does not claim to be read, as citing any of them for the further and much larger claim that animal products themselves are haram. That further claim remains the letter's own, unsupported by the four names it invokes here. The distinction between a well-grounded welfare argument and a much shakier prohibition argument is the organising thread of the fuller case set out at The Whole Argument, Step by Step.

An open letter that goes further: prohibition versus lawful use

This page has read Javadi and Masoudi's article on its own terms throughout: a Qom-milieu academic study that assumes lawful use, riding, milking and slaughter, and asks only what is owed to an animal within that framework. It is worth closing by setting that study directly against a very different Persian-language document this site also holds: an anonymous open letter addressed to Shia Muslims, arguing that meat, dairy and eggs are today haram. The two texts share a surprising amount of legal vocabulary, which makes the place where they diverge unusually visible.

The letter reaches for several of the same maxims this article documents in the deposited-animal and thirsty-animal cases: the prohibition of idha' (causing an animal pain or distress), la darar wa la dirar (serious harm makes a thing forbidden), and the principle that a ruling follows its subject matter and changes when the subject changes (al-hukm yadur ma'a al-mawdu'). Where Javadi and Masoudi use idha' to forbid specific acts — beating, branding the face, mutilation, overloading, milking with long nails — while leaving the underlying permission to keep, milk, ride and slaughter animals untouched, the letter applies the same principle to the industrial system as a whole and concludes that confinement, forced repeated calving, mother–young separation and high-speed slaughter are so pervasive and severe that the animal at the end of the modern supply chain is, in its words, "a confined, sick, structurally tortured animal" rather than the healthy, freely living, traditionally slaughtered animal the classical rulings on meat assumed. On the letter's reading, the subject matter has changed enough that the ruling itself must change with it — from permissible to forbidden. That is a considerably larger claim than anything Javadi and Masoudi argue, and it is the letter's own extension, not a conclusion this article reaches or would necessarily endorse.

The letter also reaches for hurmat al-i'ana 'ala al-zulm, the prohibition of assisting wrongdoing, arguing that every purchase of meat, milk or eggs finances cages, debeaking, forced separation and the routine culling of male chicks, and is therefore itself a form of participation in wrong. Javadi and Masoudi's article has no equivalent claim; its closest material is the six rights of a mount and 'Ali's zakat-collector instructions discussed above, both of which concern how an animal already in someone's care must be treated, not whether financing its keeping is itself wrongdoing. The letter's assisting-wrongdoing argument is a further inferential step the letter takes on its own, using a maxim that is genuinely part of the fiqh apparatus but has not, so far as either source supplied to this site shows, been applied this way by any named jurist or marja'.

It is worth being exact about where the letter goes beyond the study, because the two are easy to conflate for a reader encountering both for the first time. Javadi and Masoudi never say that lawful use becomes unlawful when conditions worsen; they document obligations owed within a use that remains lawful throughout. The letter's own closing verdict, by contrast, explicitly reframes itself as a conditional "ijtihadi fatwa" — its own word — reasoning that if the cruelty ended, animals were kept naturally, the alleged harms were removed and a genuine nutritional need existed, the ruling could revert to permissibility. Whatever the merits of that argument, it has no institutional standing: no named author, no hawza affiliation, and no marja' behind it, and it should never be read as a Shia ruling, an Ja'fari fatwa, or as continuous with the Javadi–Masoudi article's own, much narrower, conclusions. Mainstream Sunni and Shia authorities alike continue to hold meat, dairy and eggs permissible; the letter's haram conclusion is a minority advocacy position, not a report of settled law. Readers who want to see the letter's full argument, its use of hadith of varying reliability, and its more contestable scientific claims set out and weighed can read it directly at the open letter.