“…for one of its wings carries a disease and the other its cure.” Al-Shāfiʿī, however, regards the inference drawn from this ḥadīth as weak, arguing that the plain sense of the Qur’an shows that carrion and blood are two distinct categories of prohibited substances. With respect to carrion, ritual slaughter (tadhkiyah) is operative—and that only in animals whose flesh is, by consensus, lawful to eat—whereas slaughter has no effect on blood at all; hence the rulings on the two necessarily diverge. How, then, can they be amalgamated to the point that one claims blood is the very reason carrion is forbidden? This, as you can see, is a forceful objection. Had blood truly been the cause of carrion’s prohibition, the animal would not become lawful through slaughter, for the blood remaining inside the slaughtered beast would still be unlawful; permissibility would arise only after that blood had fully drained away. Whenever the cause disappears, the effect it necessitates must likewise disappear, for if the cause is present while the effect is absent, it cannot in fact be the cause. A comparable case is that, were the prohibition on grape juice to lapse, intoxication would have to lapse as well—assuming we believe intoxication is the reason for its prohibition.
Those who except carrion of the sea rely on the sound report transmitted by Jābir: “They ate from the great fish the sea had cast ashore for several days and provisioned themselves from it; when they told the Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—of this, he approved their action and asked, ‘Do any of it remain with you?’” This shows that he did not permit it merely because their provisions had run out. They also cite his—peace be upon him—statement: “Its water is purifying and its dead are lawful.”
Abū Ḥanīfah, however, preferred the general purport of the verse over this report—either because the verse is definitive while the report is conjectural, or because he deemed the incident related by Jābir a special concession, or because he considered it possible that the fish had died through an external cause, namely the sea’s casting it onto the shore; for in his view carrion is that which dies of itself, without any external cause.
A further reason for their disagreement is the ambiguity of the pronoun in the Almighty’s words, “and its food as provision for you and for the travelers” (al-Māʾidah 5:96). If the pronoun is taken to refer to the sea, then “its food” is whatever floats upon it; if it refers to the game itself, then only that game of the sea which has been declared lawful may be eaten. The Kūfan jurists also adduced a report that forbids floating fish, yet they themselves acknowledge the report to be weak.
Issue Two:
Just as they differed over the types of carrion, they likewise differed concerning the constituent parts of what they all agree is carrion