A Persian Case for Muslim Veganism

Somewhere on the Persian-language internet, on a site called Sabzito ("Little Green Thing"), sits an essay titled "Islam and Vegetarianism". It is not academic theology, not a fatwa, and not affiliated with any seminary or fiqh council. It reads like what it is: an advocacy piece, written with conviction, aimed at Persian-speaking Muslims who assume — often without examining the assumption very closely — that veganism is a foreign lifestyle import, alien to the moral world of Islam. The essay's whole project is to contest that assumption from inside the tradition rather than outside it: to show, using Qur'an, hadith, and Shi'i-transmitted sayings, that a plant-centred ethic sits closer to Islam's own account of mercy than most Muslims are taught to think.

This page takes that essay seriously enough to summarise its argument fully and fairly, and then to test it. Testing it does not mean dismissing it. Some of what the source assembles — the range and consistency of texts on animal welfare, the observation that halal certification says nothing about conditions of rearing — is worth any reader's attention regardless of where they land on the underlying question. Other parts of the argument ask the texts to carry more weight than they can plausibly bear. Both things can be true at once, and separating them is the point of this page.

"A Western import"

The essay opens by naming an objection its intended readers will already recognise: that veganism is a lifestyle trend manufactured in wealthy, secular societies, wrapped in a vocabulary — "plant-based," "cruelty-free," "ethical consumption" — that has nothing to do with fourteen centuries of Islamic jurisprudence, and quite a lot to do with contemporary Western anxieties about diet and identity. On this view, a Muslim who adopts veganism is not applying Islamic ethics more consistently; they are importing a foreign framework and dressing it up in religious language after the fact.

The source's response is not to defend veganism as Western and argue Muslims should adopt it anyway. It is to reject the premise: that what veganism actually asks for — kindness to animals, reduction of unnecessary harm, responsible consumption — is not foreign to Islam at all, but drawn from vocabulary (rahma, akhlaq, amana) that the Qur'an and hadith use constantly and long before any modern animal-rights movement existed. The claim, in other words, is convergence rather than borrowing: Islam and veganism are said to arrive at similar conclusions about cruelty from entirely independent starting points, which is a different and more defensible claim than saying Islam somehow anticipated veganism as a programme.

This is a reasonable opening move, and it is worth taking at face value before assessing where it leads. Dismissing an ethical claim purely because of its perceived cultural origin is a weak form of argument in any direction — it proves nothing about whether the claim is true, only about who has said it recently and loudly. The source is right that the "Western import" label functions more as a conversation-stopper than an argument, and right that the proper response to it is to look at what is actually being asked for, which is the essay's next move.

Defining veganism, and the possible clause

The essay quotes The Vegan Society's own definition of veganism: "a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude — as far as is possible and practicable — all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose." Its argument from this definition is straightforward: nothing in that sentence requires a change of creed, a denial of any Islamic belief, or opposition to a single ruling that Islam actually makes obligatory. It asks only for kindness, harm-reduction, and responsible choice — values the Qur'an and Sunnah repeatedly commend under their own names.

The clause the source leans on hardest is "as far as is possible and practicable." This is doing real work in the argument, and it is worth being explicit about what work it does. Read generously, it makes veganism, by its own official definition, a matter of degree and circumstance rather than an absolute rule — which is exactly the register in which Islamic law also operates, with its concepts of darura (necessity), 'usr wa yusr (hardship and ease), and rukhas (concessions). On this reading, a Muslim vegan and the Vegan Society's own definition are not asking for more than Islamic law already permits people to withhold when circumstances require it: nobody is bound to a moral maximum regardless of cost.

Read more critically, the same clause can absorb almost any objection, which makes it slippery to build a bridge on. If "possible and practicable" can flex to justify a strict abstainer and also, in principle, someone who eats meat occasionally at a wedding because refusing would strain a relationship, then the definition is compatible with Islam not because the two systems agree on much of substance, but because the definition itself is elastic enough to be compatible with almost any position a person already holds. That is not a reason to dismiss the argument, but it is a reason to treat the "compatibility" claim as considerably weaker than "Islam requires veganism," which — to the source's credit — it never quite asserts. What it asserts is the more modest claim that nothing in the definition of veganism conflicts with Islamic creed. That modest claim survives scrutiny reasonably well.

The catalogue of factory-farm harms

The essay's most concrete and, in a sense, least contestable section is its catalogue of conditions inside industrial animal agriculture. Dairy cows are kept in a continuous cycle of artificial insemination and milking; calves are removed from their mothers immediately after birth, an event the source describes in terms of audible maternal distress, and are then confined in small crates and fed formula rather than milk, developing signs of anxiety and physical strain. Laying hens are kept in cramped, often lightless conditions; their beaks are trimmed to prevent them pecking one another out of stress; some operations use forced moulting, withholding food for a period of weeks to reset a flock's laying cycle, which the source calls a severe form of physical and psychological ordeal. Pigs and turkeys are bred and confined for maximum growth in minimum time, with little room for anything resembling natural behaviour.

None of this is exotic or contested territory; it corresponds closely to what veterinary and animal-welfare literature independently documents about intensive livestock systems in much of the world. The essay's more pointed claim — and the one likely to unsettle readers who assume halal certification settles the question — is that many farms carrying halal certification nonetheless practise these same methods. Certification, on this reading, verifies the moment and manner of slaughter; it says essentially nothing about how the animal was raised for the months or years before that moment. A calf can be separated from its mother, confined, and raised under artificial light its whole short life, and still be slaughtered in a manner that qualifies the resulting meat as halal.

Mercy in the texts

The theological core of the essay is a set of texts on mercy toward creatures. Qur'an 6:38 states that every creature on earth and every bird that flies is part of "communities like you" (umam amthalukum) — a verse long read by commentators as extending moral consideration to the animal world rather than treating it as inert resource. The two hadiths of the dog and the cat, transmitted in both Bukhari and Muslim, are among the best-attested texts in the entire corpus on this theme: a woman was forgiven her sins for giving water to a dying, thirsty dog; another woman was punished for confining a cat and neither feeding it nor releasing it to forage for itself. These are canonical, widely cited, and doctrinally secure — no serious scholar disputes their authenticity or their basic point, that cruelty to an animal is a real moral wrong with real consequences, independent of the animal's usefulness to any human purpose.

The essay also cites the hummara report: a small bird whose chicks were taken by some of the Prophet's ﷺ companions on a journey, at which the mother bird circled overhead in visible distress, and the Prophet ﷺ is reported to have asked, "Who has wronged this bird by taking its young? Return its young to it." This is a well-known and often-cited narrative in Islamic animal-ethics writing, and versions of it do appear with sound chains in the hadith literature. The source's own citation for it, however, is a work called al-Rasul, volume 1, page 144 — a later Persian-language compilation rather than one of the six canonical Sunni hadith collections or a recognised Shi'i hadith source. That does not mean the report is false; comparable versions of this narrative are attested elsewhere with better chains. But it does mean the specific citation the source gives is not, by itself, a canonical reference, and a careful reader should treat the wording and precise attribution as needing independent verification rather than taking the source's footnote at face value.

Two further texts round out this section. First, a hadith declaring a curse on "whoever mutilates an animal" (man maththala bi'l-hayawan) — cutting off an ear, nose, tail, or other limb without lawful cause — which is well-attested across the hadith literature and forms the basis of the classical juristic prohibition on muthla, mutilation, whether of animals or, in a related body of texts, of the human dead in warfare. Second, a saying attributed to Imam 'Ali: "Do not strike animals on the face and do not curse them, for God curses the one who curses them" (la tadribu al-wujuh wa la tal'anuha, fa-inna Allaha 'azza wa jalla la'ana la'inaha). This is Shi'i-transmitted material, carried in sources associated with Nahj al-Balagha and related collections; its authenticity is assessed within Shi'i hadith methodology rather than the Sunni six-book canon, which is worth flagging for readers unfamiliar with how the two traditions handle sayings attributed to 'Ali.

Mutilation, then and now

The essay's most interesting interpretive move is to apply the classical prohibition on muthla — originally understood in terms of cutting an animal's ear, tail, or limb, largely in the context of livestock marking, wartime cruelty, or using animals as targets — to modern industrial practices like beak-trimming in poultry and tail-docking in pigs. The underlying logic is not unreasonable: if the prohibited harm is the needless removal or injury of a body part for human convenience rather than the animal's benefit, a beak trimmed with a hot blade to control a stress response caused by overcrowding looks, functionally, like exactly the kind of act these hadiths were meant to forbid, even though blades and battery cages did not exist for the jurists who first discussed muthla.

This is a live style of reasoning in Islamic law — extending a general prohibition to new instances that share its underlying cause ('illa) — and it is not, in principle, illegitimate. Where it needs care is in distinguishing an analogy a reader finds persuasive from an analogy that a qualified jurist has actually worked through and ratified. The essay makes the analogy; it does not present it as an established fiqh ruling issued by any scholar or body, and readers should hold the two apart. As a piece of moral reasoning applying a Qur'anic and hadith-based principle to a contemporary practice, it is worth taking seriously. As a claim about settled Islamic law, it is not there yet, and the essay itself does not actually claim that it is.

The universalist close

The essay ends by stepping back from specifically Islamic texts to make a broader claim: that beneath what it calls "divine principles" across traditions runs one shared message — non-harm, compassion, empathy, kindness, with particular concern for the weakest and most defenceless creatures. On this reading, veganism is not a specifically Islamic practice, nor a specifically Western one, but a universal ethical possibility available to anyone regardless of belief or background. The closing line asks the reader to imagine looking into the eyes of an animal and saying, "you deserve to live, not to be sacrificed for me," and asks whether a more spiritual way of living than that is really available.

This is a rhetorically effective ending, and it is worth taking seriously as a piece of moral appeal rather than dismissing it as sentimentality. But it is also the point at which the essay moves furthest from textual argument into something closer to comparative-religion gesture, and readers should notice the shift. "Non-harm is the shared core of religious traditions" is a claim that flattens real and significant differences between traditions — including within Islam's own textual record, which permits animal slaughter for food, for qurbani, and historically for a range of other purposes, and which does not treat all killing of animals as harm in the morally relevant sense the essay's conclusion implies. The strength of the essay's textual sections comes precisely from staying close to specific Qur'anic verses and hadiths; the closing universalism trades some of that precision for emotional reach.

What the argument establishes

Stripped of its rhetorical close, what does the essay actually demonstrate, on its own textual evidence? Several things reasonably well. First, that cruelty to animals is a genuine and textually well-attested Islamic concern, not a modern import grafted onto the tradition — the dog and cat hadiths alone settle that point beyond argument, since they are canonical, widely transmitted, and unambiguous in their message. Second, that halal certification as commonly practised addresses slaughter method and not rearing conditions, which is a documentable gap rather than a matter of interpretation. Third, that a definition of veganism built around proportionate, circumstance-sensitive harm reduction is not, on its face, asking Muslims to abandon anything Islam requires of them.

What the essay does not establish, and to its credit rarely claims to establish, is that eating meat or dairy is impermissible, or that veganism is obligatory for Muslims, or that the classical schools' clear and settled position on the permissibility of eating lawfully slaughtered animals is somehow overturned by these texts. It also does not establish that the specific modern practices it condemns are uniformly present across all animal agriculture, halal or otherwise — conditions vary enormously by country, producer, and certification scheme, and the essay's catalogue, while accurate as a description of significant parts of the industrial sector, is not a claim about every farm everywhere.

Where a jurist would push back

A traditionally trained jurist reading this essay would likely make three distinct points, and it is worth setting them out fairly rather than gesturing at "the classical position" as a single undifferentiated block.

A third point concerns method rather than content: several of the essay's supporting texts are weaker than its central ones, and a critical reader should not let the strength of the canonical material (the dog and cat hadiths, the muthla prohibition, Q 6:38) lend borrowed credibility to the weaker material sitting beside it (the hummara citation via a non-canonical Persian compilation, the Shi'i-transmitted saying of 'Ali which needs its own authentication standard rather than the Sunni six-book one). Good argument does not require every supporting text to be equally strong, but it does require being honest about which texts are doing the load-bearing work and which are decorative.

Where the argument is strongest

It would be a mistake to let the critical points above obscure what the essay gets right, and it gets a good deal right. Its strongest ground is not the abstention argument but the welfare argument: that specific, identifiable, documented practices in modern animal agriculture — calf separation causing evident maternal distress, routine beak-trimming, forced moulting through starvation, extreme confinement — sit uncomfortably close to what canonical, undisputed hadiths call cruelty, and that a halal label does not currently certify against any of it. That is a claim any Muslim, whatever they conclude about veganism itself, can and arguably should take seriously, because it does not require accepting a new dietary rule; it only requires applying an old and uncontested one — kindness to animals — more consistently to a food system that did not exist when most of the relevant fiqh was written.

The essay is also right that "Western import" functions as a conversation-stopper rather than an argument, and right to insist that the actual content of an ethical claim, not its geographic origin, is what should be assessed. Whatever one concludes about veganism as a personal practice, dismissing it purely as foreign borrowing is not a serious response to the specific texts and specific harms the essay puts on the table.

Reading the source for what it is

It is worth being plain, in closing, about what kind of document this is. Sabzito is a Persian-language advocacy website, not a fatwa council, not a seminary, and not a peer-reviewed academic source. Its argument carries a noticeable Shi'i inflection — visible in its reliance on sayings attributed to Imam 'Ali and Nahj al-Balagha-adjacent material — which is a legitimate and coherent intellectual tradition in its own right, but readers from other parts of the Muslim world should recognise it as one voice within a broader and more varied conversation, not a representative statement of "the Islamic position." Nothing in this essay, and nothing in this response to it, amounts to a ruling that meat or dairy is prohibited; the classical position that these are permitted is not in serious dispute anywhere in this discussion. What is genuinely in play, and worth taking from the essay regardless of where a reader ultimately lands, is a narrower and more defensible claim: that Islamic ethics has real, textually grounded things to say about how animals are treated before they ever reach a plate, and that a halal label, on its own, does not answer that question.