Nishapur (d. 1074), al-Ansari of Harat (d. 1089),
and al-ghazali of Tus (d. 1111).
See also allah; sUFism.
Further reading: Ali ibn Uthman al-Hujwiri, The Kashf
al-Mahjub: The Oldest Persian Treatise on Sufism. Trans-
lated by R. A. Nicholson (1959. Reprint, New Delhi: Taj
Printers, 1997); Michael Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism:
Sufi, Quran, Miraj, Poetic and Theological Writings (New
York: Paulist Press, 1996).
halal (Arabic: permissible, lawful)
Islam is a religion that assigns significant attention
to practice. This is evident in the priority Muslims
have given to performing the Five pillars of ritual
worship and observing the sharia. Practice is an
aspect of religious identity and social life, and,
in Islamic belief, it affects a person’s Fat e in the
aFterliFe. From the start, Muslims relied on a
convenient set of categories for classifying lawful
and unlawful practices. Halal was one of these
categories, used for classifying “permissible,” law-
ful practices in accordance with the qUran, the
sUnna, and the doctrines of the different schools
of Islamic law (fiqh). Its counterpart for designat-
ing unlawful, forbidden practices was haram. Both
terms contribute to defining the ethical standards
that Muslims are enjoined to follow in the con-
duct of their lives.
The binary categories of halal and haram (and
related terms based on the Arabic consonantal
roots h-l-l and h-r-m) were established by the
Quran, where they were used in connection with
ritual acts of worship, dietary laWs, and family
law. They are therefore believed to have been
created by God. Moreover, Muslims believe that
the range of things that God has made lawful is
much more inclusive than what he has forbid-
den. After mUhammad’s death in 632, during the
early centuries of the Arab Islamicate empire,
religious scholars and jurists seem to have found
the binary classification of practices too inflexible
to regulate everyday life, so they devised an alter-
native scheme of five categories (ahkam), placed
on a scale of acts as follows: obligatory (wajib/
fard), recommended (mandub), merely permitted
(mubah), disapproved (makruh), and forbidden
(haram). Halal was therefore replaced by three
different degrees of lawfulness, or permissibility.
Jurists ruled that performance of obligatory acts
was rewarded by God, and their omission was
punishable. Recommended acts were rewarded but
not punishable for their omission. Acts that were
merely permitted were neutral, subject neither
to reward or punishment, and acts disapproved
were reprehensible but not subject to punishment.
This schema gave jurists more flexibility when
debating sacred law and issuing judgments and
advisory rulings (fatwas). In recent times, when
Muslims have had to deal with different kinds of
value systems and legal traditions and when some
Islamic movements have sought to reformulate
Islam into an ideology for mobilizing the masses,
many have resorted to assessing practices once
again in terms of the simpler binary categories of
halal and haram.
Muslims have used halal most widely to cate-
gorize foods that conform to Islamic dietary laws.
Meat from domesticated animals (for example,
sheep, cattle, camels, poultry) that have been
correctly slaughtered and drained of all blood is
considered to be halal. Other prepared foods and
beverages, as long as they do not contain alcohol,
blood, carrion, or other impure substances, are
also classified as halal. Groceries and restaurants
that sell food to Muslims in countries where they
are a minority, such as in Europe and the Ameri-
cas, often advertise that they offer halal foods. As
the term kosher is used on food product labels for
Jews, the designation halal can also be found on
some food products for Muslims. Such labeling
has become the subject of consumer protection
laws in the United States. The usage of halal,
moreover, extends well beyond the dining table
and the grocery store. In the most widely pub-
lished book on the subject, Egyptian religious
scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi (b. 1926) employs it inK 284 halal