Animals in the Qur'an

Open the Qur'an at almost any point and animals are not far away. Cattle, ants, bees, elephants, dogs, spiders, hoopoes, and a stubborn she-camel all appear not as decoration but as bearers of theological weight. The text uses them to illustrate divine power, to rebuke human arrogance, to model obedience, and — repeatedly — to remind the reader that the natural world has a status independent of human utility. At the same time, the Qur'an is equally direct in telling human beings that livestock, in particular, have been placed at their disposal: for riding, for milk, for wool, and for meat. Reading the Qur'an honestly on animals means holding both of these threads together rather than picking the one that suits a prior conclusion.

\u201cCommunities like you\u201d

The single verse most often cited in Muslim discussions of animal ethics is 6:38, from Surat al-An'am — itself named after livestock (an'am). The verse states plainly that every creature on earth and every bird that flies with its wings is part of communities like human communities.

Classical exegetes did not read this verse identically. al-Tabari records the view that umam ("communities" or "nations") here signifies that animals, like human groups, are created, sustained, and will be resurrected and judged in some fashion — a position with support from a hadith in which the Prophet ﷺ is reported to have said that on the Day of Judgement even the rights of a hornless sheep against a horned one would be settled. Others read the term more loosely, as an assertion that animal species form organised kinds with their own instincts and social order, without committing to anything about an animal afterlife. Sarra Tlili's academic study of the verse argues that the Qur'an consistently resists reducing animals to mere instruments, and that 6:38 is part of a wider pattern in which non-human creatures are granted their own standing before God, independent of their usefulness to people. The verse does not, on any reading, settle questions of diet or use; but it does insist that animals are not morally weightless.

Animals that glorify God

A second recurring motif is that everything in creation — heavens, earth, mountains, birds, and by extension other animals — glorifies (yusabbihu) God, even if human beings cannot perceive or comprehend how.

Tafsir literature treats these verses with a certain humility. Ibn Kathir notes differing opinions on whether this glorification is a form of speech unknown to humans, an involuntary declaration written into an animal's very existence and function, or something closer to instinctive behaviour that nonetheless testifies to the Creator. What matters for present purposes is less the metaphysics than the rhetorical effect: an animal's value is anchored, in the text's own logic, to its relationship with God rather than solely to its relationship with human beings. A bird in flight is not simply potential food or a nuisance; it is depicted, in the Qur'an's own words, as a worshipper.

The open letter to Shia Muslims on the livestock industry leans heavily on this same motif, attributing to Imam al-Sajjad a saying to the effect that there is nothing that does not glorify God with His praise — in substance the wording of 17:44 rather than a separately verified hadith text — and applying it directly to farmed animals: the confined hen, the frightened sheep, the grieving cow are each, on the letter's reading, still worshippers even while suffering, which the letter takes as heightening rather than lessening the wrong of causing them harm. That is the letter's homiletic use of the verse; the Qur'an itself, in 17:44 and 24:41, makes the broader theological claim about all creation without drawing that specific conclusion about livestock farming.

Surahs named after animals

The Qur'an's engagement with animals is not confined to isolated verses; it is written into the architecture of the text itself. Al-Baqara ("The Cow"), the Qur'an's longest surah, takes its title from the account of the cow that the Israelites were commanded to sacrifice. Al-An'am ("The Cattle" or "Livestock") is named for its extended discussion of pastoral animals and the pagan customs surrounding them that the Qur'an criticises. Al-Nahl ("The Bee") includes the celebrated passage on the bee's instinctive wisdom (16:68-69), often read as an image of revelation itself — inspiration (awha) is the very word used for what is given to the bee. Al-Naml ("The Ant") houses the narrative of Sulayman and the ant discussed below. Al-'Ankabut ("The Spider") uses the spider's fragile web as a metaphor for reliance on anything other than God. Al-Fil ("The Elephant") recounts the defeat of Abraha's war-elephant before the Ka'ba, and al-'Adiyat ("The Chargers") opens with galloping war-horses. That six or more surahs are named for animals is not proof of any particular ethical doctrine, but it is a reasonable indication that animals functioned in the Qur'an's own self-presentation as more than incidental furniture.

Permission to use animals

Set against this is an equally consistent Qur'anic theme: livestock have been given to human beings for use, and this gift is presented as evidence of divine mercy and a reason for gratitude.

Three things stand out about these passages when read together. First, the permission is unambiguous: livestock may be ridden, milked, sheared, and eaten. Second, the permission is consistently framed as a favour requiring shukr (gratitude), not as a morally neutral fact about property. Third, the passages sit in contexts that are overwhelmingly about divine power and human dependence rather than about the mechanics of husbandry. This has led different readers to draw different conclusions about how much ethical freight the passages carry.

The ant and the she-camel

Two narratives sharpen the theme of restraint toward vulnerable creatures. The first occurs in the story of Sulayman (Solomon) and his army passing through a valley of ants.

Sulayman's response is telling: he does not treat the ant's concern as trivial. His prayer for gratitude is provoked directly by witnessing a small creature protecting its community from harm his own army might unknowingly cause. Commentators read this as an illustration of a prophet's heightened sensitivity to the wellbeing of even the smallest of God's creatures, and of the link between gratitude for power and responsibility in how that power is used.

The second narrative, that of the she-camel sent as a sign to the people of Thamud through the prophet Salih, is recounted across several surahs and treated with unusual seriousness.

The camel's hamstringing is presented as the decisive act of defiance that brought divine punishment on the entire community, not a side detail. Exegetes disagree about how much of the moral is about the sanctity of the specific miraculous sign, as opposed to a broader principle about cruelty toward animals more generally, but the narrative structure itself — mistreatment of an animal as the proximate cause of a community's destruction — has made this one of the texts most frequently invoked in Islamic discussions of animal welfare.

"A mercy to all the worlds": 21:107

Qur'an 21:107 — "We have not sent you [O Muhammad] except as a mercy to the worlds (rahmatan li'l-'alamin)" — is the key verse of the anonymous open letter to Shia Muslims on the livestock industry, which opens with it and returns to it in its closing appeal. The letter reads "al-'alamin" expansively, as encompassing animals, nature and all being, not human beings alone, and asks how a mercy sent to all the worlds can be squared with financing what the letter calls a system built on animal suffering. Read this way, the verse becomes the letter's organising theological claim: that Islam's core self-description as a religion of universal mercy has direct, unavoidable implications for how animals are treated.

That expansive reading of "al-'alamin" is a real and defensible one — classical exegesis on 21:107 generally does read the mercy of the Prophet's ﷺ mission broadly rather than confining it to believers or to humankind alone — but it is worth being clear that the verse itself does not specify diet, slaughter, or animal agriculture; it is a general statement about the character of the Prophetic mission, and the letter's application of it to the ethics of modern livestock farming is an inference, not something 21:107 states outright. The same verse, read more narrowly, is also compatible with the mainstream position that mercy toward animals is fully honoured by the existing rules of ihsan in slaughter and care for animals, without those rules extending to a prohibition on eating them.

Qur'an 2:11 and 7:56, on not "corrupting the earth" (la tufsidu fi'l-ard), receive similar treatment in the letter, which reads the modern livestock industry's contribution to deforestation, water depletion and greenhouse-gas emissions — it cites a figure of roughly 14% of global emissions, a figure that is in line with commonly cited FAO estimates — as a form of corruption of the earth in the sense these verses warn against. Again, this is the letter's application of a general Qur'anic principle to a specific modern industry, not something the verses name explicitly, and the empirical claims behind it (on cancer risk, antibiotic resistance and similar) are, where cited on this site at all, attributed to the letter rather than restated as settled fact; the one point with firmer external grounding is that the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies processed meat as carcinogenic and red meat as probably carcinogenic, which the letter also cites accurately.

Worshippers or production units?

Putting 17:44 alongside 24:41 and 22:18 sharpens a question the open letter to Shia Muslims on the livestock industry presses repeatedly: what does it mean that a creature described in the Qur'an's own words as a worshipper is, in the modern supply chain, treated almost entirely as a unit of output — a number of eggs per year, a litre yield per lactation, a growth rate measured in days to slaughter weight.

Read together, 17:44, 24:41 and 22:18 describe three overlapping registers of the same claim — exaltation (tasbih), prayer (salah), and prostration (sujud) — applied to the whole of creation, animals included, and in each case followed by a reminder that human perception of this is limited. The letter's argument is not that this settles a ruling on diet; it argues something narrower and more atmospheric: that a caged hen or a cow on a zero-grazing unit does not stop being, in the Qur'an's own description, a worshipper simply because an industrial system has redescribed her as an input. If that description is taken seriously even as background theology, the letter suggests, it should at least unsettle a purely instrumental way of talking and thinking about the animal — the language of "production units," "stock," and "yield" that dominates contemporary agribusiness and, increasingly, ordinary conversation about food.

This is best read as a framing move rather than a legal argument, and it is worth being honest about its limits. Nothing in 17:44, 24:41 or 22:18 addresses husbandry, confinement, or slaughter, and the mainstream position across Sunni and Twelver fiqh alike has never treated an animal's status as a glorifier of God as in tension with its lawful use for food, milk, or labour — the two ideas have historically been held together rather than seen as opposed, in exactly the way 16:5-8 pairs livestock's usefulness with the language of ni'ma. What the letter adds to that long-standing pairing is an empirical claim about scale and method: that a system organised entirely around throughput leaves progressively less room for the older ethic of gratitude and restraint that classical exegetes assumed would accompany the permission. Whether that claim is fair to any particular farm or supply chain is a separate, factual question this page cannot settle; what these verses do settle is that the theological premise — an animal is not reducible to its output — is not itself an invention of modern animal-welfare advocacy. It is sitting in the text.

The same letter connects this reading back to 6:38's "communities like you" and to 21:107's description of the Prophet's ﷺ mission as rahmatan li'l-'alamin, a mercy to "the worlds." It is worth being precise about the grammar here, because the letter leans on it directly: al-'alamin is a plural encompassing all realms of being, not a word that means humankind specifically, and classical exegesis on 21:107 generally reads the mercy of the Prophetic mission broadly rather than confining it to any one class of creature. That is a real feature of the verse's wording, not an invented one. Whether that broad grammatical scope is sufficient, on its own, to underwrite a specific ethical verdict about modern livestock farming is a further, contested inferential step — the same kind of step examined above in relation to 21:107 and 2:11/7:56 — and readers should weigh the letter's use of these three verses together as a cumulative theological mood rather than as a chain of proofs each strong enough to stand alone. The fuller structure of that broader case, including where mainstream fiqh disagrees with it, is set out step by step at The Whole Argument, Step by Step.

Balance and the mizan

Surat al-Rahman offers a cosmic frame for all of this in its teaching on the mizan, the balance.

Though the immediate context concerns just weighing in trade, many exegetes and later writers, particularly in ecological and ethical readings of the Qur'an, extend the mizan to the balance of creation as a whole — climatic, ecological, and by extension the balance between human need and the wellbeing of other creatures. This extension is an interpretive move rather than a strict textual entailment, and it is worth being honest about that: 55:7-9 is not, on its most literal reading, a verse about animal husbandry. But its placement immediately after verses describing the heavens, the earth, and the vegetation "with sheaths" gives the balance a cosmological resonance that later scholars, environmentalists among them, have found difficult to resist applying to the entire created order, animals included.

Animals as signs

Across the Qur'an, animals recur as ayat — literally "signs," the same word used for the verses of the Qur'an itself. Cattle's milk emerging "from between excretion and blood" (16:66) is offered as a sign of divine artistry. The variety of colours among livestock, alongside mountains and people, is cited in 35:27-28 as evidence of God's creative range. Birds held aloft in the sky "by nothing but God" (16:79) are presented as proof against those who doubt providence. This vocabulary matters: an ayah is something that points beyond itself, that exists to be read and reflected upon. When the Qur'an calls an animal or its behaviour a sign, it is assigning that creature a theological function that exceeds mere usefulness to humans, even while, in the very same passages, affirming that the animal is also useful.

The peer-reviewed study by Mohsen Javadi and Asghar Masoudi, "Animal Rights from the Islamic Perspective," draws on a wider set of verses to make a related but distinct academic argument — not that animal products are unlawful, which it does not claim, but that animal welfare is a genuine claim of God (haqq Allah) running through the Qur'anic text. Among the verses the study cites: 4:119, where Satan boasts he will command people to "slit the ears of cattle and alter God's creation," read as the Qur'an itself classing mutilation as ugly and satanic; 29:60 and 11:6, on God's own guarantee of provision for every creature that "carries not its own provision"; 20:54, where the command to eat is immediately followed by the command to pasture the herds; 5:4, read by the authors as implying that a hunting animal is entitled to a share of its own catch; and 35:45, on the idea that human sin has consequences for animals generally. The study is careful throughout to note that 16:5, on livestock created "for you," does not mean animals are unhonoured before God or that their rights may be disregarded. This is academic exegesis in service of an animal-welfare argument that assumes lawful use, not a vegetarian or vegan reading of these verses, and it should not be cited as though it were either.

Usufruct versus stewardship

Put the threads together and an honest tension remains, one this whole site is built around rather than one that can be resolved by a single proof-text. The Qur'an unmistakably grants usufruct: livestock may be ridden, milked, and eaten, and this permission is restated across several surahs in terms that assume ongoing practice rather than merely tolerating it. At the same time, the Qur'an frames animals as communities with their own standing, as worshippers in a mode humans cannot fully perceive, as protagonists in narratives where mistreating them brings real consequence, and as signs whose value lies partly in what they reveal about God rather than in what they yield to their owners.

This is why later Islamic scholarship developed an entire vocabulary — taskhir (subjection of creation for human benefit), amana (trust), khilafa (stewardship or vicegerency) — to describe the relationship the Qur'an implies rather than states outright. None of these terms appears as a systematic doctrine within a single verse; they are theological syntheses built from exactly the kind of juxtaposition traced here. Whatever conclusions a reader ultimately draws about diet, slaughter, or animal husbandry, the Qur'anic text itself insists that the question cannot be answered by usufruct alone, nor by sanctity alone, but only by holding both together with seriousness.