Sūrat Al-Ma'idah 3 — The Sentence in the Middle of the List

Count them. The dead thing, the blood, swine, what had a voice raised over it, the strangled, the beaten, the fallen, the gored, what a beast has eaten, what was slaughtered at the stones — and eleventh, that you seek your portions with arrows. Ten things you might put in your mouth, and one you could not eat if you tried.

The first four are the whole list everywhere else. Three other places in the Qur’ān name what is forbidden of food, and all three stop at four: the dead thing, blood, swine, and what was dedicated aloud to another. The five that come next are a rope, a club, a fall, a horn and a mouth.

And the grounds keep changing. The first three are forbidden for what they are, the fourth for a sound made over it, the middle five for the way the animal stopped living, the tenth for where it was slaughtered. Not one is forbidden for being unwholesome. A goat gored at noon and found still warm is on the list with a goat that went off a cliff a week ago.

The five in the middle are all one death: an animal that stopped breathing without being cut. They come apart only by what stopped it, and the Arabic gives each its own participle instead of collecting them under a heading — munkhaniqah, mawqūdhah, mutaraddiyah, naṭīḥah. Then the fifth is not a participle at all but a small sentence: wa-mā akala s-sabuʿ, what the wild beast ate. The beast is the only killer the list names, and the only one given a verb.

Those four words appear here and in no other āyah. Search the muṣḥaf for ٱلْمُنْخَنِقَةُ, ٱلْمَوْقُوذَةُ, ٱلْمُتَرَدِّيَةُ or ٱلنَّطِيحَةُ and you get one verse. So does ذَكَّيْتُمْ, the verb that lets you out of them. Five words used once each in the whole Qur’ān, and the sentence people memorise stands among them.

Illā mā dhakkaytum arrives after item nine. Not after eleven, not after ten. It sits between what the beast ate and what was slaughtered at the stones, and where it sits is the argument about how far back it reaches.

The commentators overwhelmingly read it as reaching back over those five and no further. The strangled, the beaten, the fallen, the gored and the mauled may all still be alive; the dead thing, blood and swine are not. Early readings that ran it back further are recorded in the literature. The position that carried is the narrow one, on the ground that you cannot slaughter what is already dead.

So in five of the eleven, the difference between lawful and forbidden is a matter of minutes. Each is named as though the thing were finished, wearing the participle of a completed event, and then the verse says: unless you got there in time. The animal in the ditch is al-mutaraddiyah and forbidden, and is also, until it dies, a sheep you may still cut.

What counts as “in time” is where the schools separate, and this page does not go there. The verb is Form II — the jurists’ noun for it is tadhkiyah — and how much life must be perceptible at the cut, whether a twitch or a flow of blood suffices, is argued school by school, and is a live question in every modern abattoir. Take it to the requirements of dhabīḥah, the question of stunning, and /rulings/.

Mā uhilla li-ghayri llāhi bih forbids a sound. The root is the root of the hilāl, the new crescent — because what people did on sighting it was raise their voices — and of the pilgrim’s ihlāl, the shout of labbayk as he enters iḥrām. Nothing here is about the beast, the knife or the cut. A healthy sheep, slaughtered correctly by a competent hand, joins the strangled and the gored the moment a name that is not Allah’s is called over it. The matching prohibition — meat over which Allah’s name was not said — is Qur’an 6:121, and that verse calls it fisq too.

And the tenth item forbids a place. Wa-mā dhubiḥa ʿala n-nuṣub — the preposition is ʿalā, at them, over them, up against them. Not to them. One item names what was said, this one names where the animal was laid; a man could keep his mouth shut and still fall under it.

What an-nuṣub were is less settled than translations suggest. The root gives standing a thing upright and nothing else. Commentators differ over whether the word is a plural or a singular used for many, and over whether it means the stones that stood round the Kaʿbah, on which blood was poured, or the idols themselves. The root will not decide it, and the verse does not describe them.

The last thing forbidden in a verse about meat is a bundle of arrows. Al-azlām were plain shafts, no head and no flight, kept marked and drawn to settle a matter. The verb is Form X of the root for dividing — tastaqsimū, to go looking for your portion, to find out what has been apportioned to you.

The commentators record two uses and do not merge them. One is divination: drawing to learn whether to travel, whether to marry, what has been decided about you. The other is apportionment by lot — dividing a slaughtered animal by drawing marked shafts, a form of gambling, which is why the practice sits in a passage about butchery at all. Both are in the literature, and the word covers seeking a share either way.

Then dhālikum fisq. The demonstrative is addressed to a group and points back, and whether it points at the arrows alone or at everything before them is discussed and not settled. Fisq is not a word for filth. Its root is going outside a boundary — the lexicographers put beside it the ripe date that has come out of its own skin.

Which is why the arrows belong here. The ten before them turn on how a beast died, or on whose name went over it, or on where it was laid down. The arrows turn on who is asked what to do next. Read the list as a hygiene notice and the eleventh item makes no sense.

It opens with nobody in it. Ḥurrimat is passive: it has been made forbidden to you. The other three food lists do not do this — two say ḥarrama ʿalaykum, He forbade you, and the third has the Prophet ﷺ told to say I do not find. Only here is the prohibition handed over with no hand attached. Eleven things go by, and a verdict, and nobody has said I.

What the disbelievers had given up on is read two ways. Yaʾisa names the moment expectation stops, and the literature records both that they had stopped hoping to put the religion down and that they had stopped hoping the Muslims would come back to theirs. Min dīnikum fits either and decides neither. Then the fear is moved rather than cancelled: fa-lā takhshawhum wa-khshawn, one root twice, negated and then commanded. Nobody is told to stop being afraid.

And the “I” arrives as a fragment. فَلَا تَخْشَوْهُمْ وَٱخْشَوْنِ — do not fear them, fear Me. Look at the last word in the Arabic above: the me is not even a syllable. The yāʾ has fallen away and left a kasrah under the nūn. That bare ending is the first time in the verse that Allah speaks as Himself.

And once it starts it does not let up. Akmaltu, atmamtu, niʿmatī, raḍītu — four first-person forms inside eleven words. Then fa-inna llāha Ghafūrun Raḥīm: a name and two adjectives, third person, at a distance again. The “I” is gone before the starving man is spoken about.

And where He speaks as I, He rules on nothing. The eleven words between wa-khshawn and the starving man are the one stretch of the āyah with no law in them.

Two more things worth counting. Al-yawma is said twice, and the second does not repeat the first: one dates a despair, the other a completion. (Āyah 5 opens with a third.) And dīn comes three times in the fifteen words from dīnikum to dīnan. Twice it is your religion — the one they gave up on, the one that was completed, and the possessive makes them the same thing. The third time the word loses its owner and goes indefinite: Islam approved for you as a religion.

The reports put the sentence at ʿArafah, on a Friday, during the Farewell Pilgrimage. It is widely reported that a man of the People of the Book told ʿUmar that had a verse like it come down to them they would have made that day a festival, and that ʿUmar answered by naming the day and the place. Notice what the exchange already is: somebody quoting the sentence on its own, with the strangled animals left out.

What “I have completed for you your religion” ranges over is genuinely disputed. One position, reported from early authorities, is that the lawful and the forbidden were finished that day and nothing of the kind came after. Against it stands the plain fact that Companions named other verses as the last revealed — the ruling on kalālah ending an-Nisāʾ, and the āyah about the Day you are returned to Allah — set out at what was the last verse revealed. A second reads the completion narrowly: the pilgrimage was performed that year in full, with no idolater making ṭawāf, and that is what was completed. A third takes al-yawma as now rather than as a dated day. The commentators did not converge, and a page that hands you one of these is deciding what they left open.

Akmaltu and atmamtu are two roots, and whether they are two ideas is argued. Some treat them as one statement made twice for weight; others separate them, tamām being the filling up of what was short and kamāl the bringing of a thing to its full state. The lexicons do not force the distinction. What is not in dispute is the pairing on the page: religion gets akmaltu, favour gets atmamtu, and the verse does not swap them.

Niʿmatī has the same root as the animals. ن ع م gives niʿmah, a favour, and al-anʿām, the grazing livestock the first āyah of this sūrah made lawful and this one is busy legislating about. The favour filled up and the beasts ruled on are named from one root, three lines apart.

Raḍītu is stronger than the sentence needs. Not permitted, not appointed: pleased with it, for you.

This sentence is also the standing proof text in the argument about bidʿah, on the reasoning that what is complete takes no additions — an argument that turns on exactly the question the commentators did not settle. The site’s treatment is at /bidah/ and in the Q&A.

Take the middle out and the verse is continuous. “Forbidden to you: the dead thing … that is going out of bounds. So whoever is driven to it in hunger…” The fāʾ of fa-mani ḍṭurra does not attach to the completion of the religion. It attaches to the prohibition, across the top of it. The grammarians describe the middle as an interposed sentence, which is also why it lifts out and quotes alone without damaging what surrounds it: the Arabic had already set it apart.

Ḍṭurra is passive. Form VIII of the root of harm, and not something the man does. He is driven. The Arabic will not let him arrange the emergency and then plead it.

And the concession here is not worded like the other three. All three parallel lists say ghayra bāghin wa-lā ʿādin — not craving it, not going past the need. This one says fī makhmaṣatin ghayra mutajānifin li-ithm, and it is the only one of the four that names the circumstance at all. It names it by what hunger does to the shape of a body: خ م ص is the root of a hollow, the root that names the akhmaṣ under the arch of the foot. Makhmaṣah occurs twice in the Qur’ān — here, opening a door into what is forbidden, and once in at-Tawbah, among hardships that get written down as a good deed.

Mutajānif puts the condition on a lean, not on a quantity. The root ج ن ف is swerving off the straight line; the Qur’ān uses the bare noun janaf of the tilt a dying man may put into his will, and Form VI makes it a lean taken rather than suffered. The other three lists say do not want it and do not overdo it. This one says do not be inclining towards a wrong, and puts the test on where the man is facing.

How much he may then eat is a real disagreement, and not one for this page. The majority restrict it to what turns death away; some hold he may eat his fill while the danger lasts. Both are argued from these words. See may I eat ḥarām food if I am starving.

And then forgiveness, after a permission. The verse ends Ghafūrun Raḥīm, attached to a case in which nothing wrong has been done. Al-Baqarah does it more sharply still: it says outright there is no sin on him, then closes with the same two names. What the forgiveness is for, when the act has just been allowed, is not stated. Commentators have offered readings; the text gives the pairing and stops.