reported that the Prophet ﷺ instructed the cupper to feed those earnings to his draught camel or to his slave.

5 – The word “vile” here does not signify religious unlawfulness; it merely conveys moral baseness and inferiority.

Ibn al-Qayyim writes in Zād al-Maʿād, in summary: It is authentically established that the Prophet ﷺ judged a cupper’s earnings to be vile and told the Companion to give them as fodder to his camel or to his slave, yet it is also authentically established that he himself underwent cupping and paid the practitioner his wage. The Prophet’s ﷺ payment of the cupper in no way contradicts his saying, “A cupper’s earnings are vile,” for he did not declare the act of giving such wages to be vile to the giver or to the one who consumes them, nor did he deem them forbidden. He merely described the income as base. Likewise he called garlic and onions “vile” without prohibiting their consumption. The fact that the Prophet ﷺ gave the cupper his wage does not automatically render eating from that wage lawful, for he ﷺ also said, “I may give a man a gift, yet he leaves carrying it under his arm as if it were a brand of fire.” He likewise gave wealth from the zakah and the spoils to those whose hearts were to be reconciled, despite their affluence and lack of need, so that they would offer to Islam and obedience what they were already obliged to render without compensation. This illustrates a well-known legal principle: a contract or an act of giving may be permissible, recommended, or obligatory for one party while being disliked or forbidden for the other. Accordingly, the giver may be obliged to give, whereas the recipient is forbidden to take.

In short, the vileness of a cupper’s wage is of the same nature as the vileness of eating garlic and onions: the latter is vile because of its odour, the former because of the manner in which it is earned.

6 – Ibn al-Qayyim noted that the jurists differed over which source of income is the purest, holding three views: trade, agriculture, or a man’s own manual labour. The preponderant opinion is that the purest earnings are those of the combatants who lawfully acquire booty sanctioned by the Lawgiver.

7 – The hadith indicates that cupping is an effective therapy for certain illnesses.

8 – It also demonstrates the permissibility of seeking treatment with beneficial and lawful medicines, and that this does not contradict reliance upon Allah, exalted be He.