—the very case Allah, Exalted be He, refers to when He says, “…and the beaten animal (al-mawqūdha).” Such an animal has been struck, and it is not lawful unless it is found alive and a proper ritual slaughter is performed.

Imam Aḥmad narrates from ʿAdī (may Allah be pleased with him): I said, “O Messenger of Allah, we are a people who shoot—what is lawful for us?” He replied, “Lawful for you is whatever you have mentioned Allah’s name over and have pierced, so eat from it.”

Majd said in al-Muntaqā: This is proof that whatever an arrow kills by the force of its weight is unlawful.

Sharḥ al-Iqnāʿ adds: If someone hunts with the miʿrāḍ, he may eat what it kills with its sharp edge, not with its broad side; the same applies to an arrow, a spear, a sword, or a knife when one strikes sideways and the quarry dies—eating it is forbidden, because the killing occurred through the weapon’s weight, not through its edge.

13- The prohibition of game taken with the flat side of an arrow or a similar weapon is the position of the majority of scholars, including the four Imams.

Some scholars of Syria—among them Makhūl and al-Awzāʿī—held it permissible. The root of the disagreement lies in their foundational premise: an animal slain by the side of an arrow counts as al-mawqūdha, because it was killed by the weapon’s weight rather than its edge; both the Qur’an and the Sunnah forbid the mawqūdha, and these are the primary sources of legislation.

The counter-premise adopted by the dissenters is that any quarry killed by an arrow is classified as ʿaqr (wounding), regardless of the manner of death; and ʿaqr, in their view, is lawful no matter how the killing occurred.

The first opinion is sounder and more cautious.

14- His words, “If you shoot with your arrow…,” mean that if a hunter shoots at game and then loses sight of it, but upon finding it detects no fatal wound other than his arrow, it is lawful for him to eat it.

The implication is that if he finds another mark that could have caused its death, it is not lawful, because a permissive factor and a prohibitive factor have converged, and the side of prohibition is given precedence.

An example of this is when he shoots and then finds the animal drowned in water, for he does not know whether it died from