Animals in Islamic Tradition and Muslim Cultures

Abstract

In his peculiarly self-abasing preface to Animals in Islamic Tradition andMuslim Cultures, Richard Foltz speculates that the audience for his bookwill probably consist of “non-Muslims who are sympathetic to Muslim cultureand interested in learning more about what it has to offer in terms ofanimal rights” (p. xii). This appears to be less of a prediction than a presuppositionguiding the book. Appropriately, Animals in Islamic Tradition is avery broad outline of representations of non-human animals from the pre-Islamic era to the present in as many fields as a 192-page book can encompass.As a result, his study tends to be kaleidoscopic, treating each subject ina very general manner, hastily running through the basics and garnishingthem with selected curiosities. For perhaps the same reason, the book is writtenin a very simple style, neither extremely engaging nor boringly obscure,and tends to provide summary rather than analysis.The issue of the non-human animal in Islam and in Islamicate culturesis not a single question, but rather a vast number of disparate questions thatultimately require detailed attention in themselves. Given the lack of attentionhitherto received by each of these specific questions, any general surveysuch as Foltz’s must necessarily be tentative and exploratory. The bookis divided into seven chapters that deal, respectively, with references to animalsin the Qur’an and the hadith literature (chapter 1), animal-relatedinjunctions in Islamic law (chapter 2), scientific and philosophical studies(chapter 3), literary and artistic representations (chapter 4), animal rights inthe contemporary era (chapter 5), Islamic vegetarianism (chapter 6), andMuslim attitudes toward dogs (chapter 7). Each chapter is further dividedinto several subheadings, making the book something of a collection of wellcategorizedarticles rather than a tightly bound narrative building up to acentral argument ...