dogs

Summary: Rights and Duties Pertaining to Kept Animals

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Summary of a case study in Islamic Law and Ethics by Musa Furber. Animals are at the heart of many of today’s heated ethical and legal debates. This paper presents a survey of Qur’anic verses and prophetic narrations related to kept animals, and a study of one school’s application of this evidence to the topic of kept animals. This ethical and legal study will also throw into relief some of the mechanism of madhhab based jurisprudence and fiqh reasoning. This study serves as a basis for understanding and applying Islamic moral theology to the numerous contemporary issues related to kept animals.

Concerning guide dogs, police dogs, and other work dogs

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Since writing “Comments on the recent ‘Dogs are not impure’ article”, several people have asked about contemporary uses for working dogs, particularly the use of guide dogs for the visually and hearing impaired, and police dogs. Several recent writings from scholars of Islamic law mention many use case and consider them analogous to the three mentioned in the ḥadīths.

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Comments on the recent ‘Dogs are not impure’ article

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I have been asked several times about the recent article titled ‘Dogs are not impure,’ says prominent Islamic scholar. I have not seen the television show or the fatwa mentioned in the article so I can comment only on the article itself.

The bulk of my reading over the past two months has been about dogs,1 so I am familiar with the issues mentioned in the article. I find the article to be poorly researched and written. Almost every paragraph contains statements that are either misleading or false. I advise readers to ignore the article and to seek their information from a reliable source.

Given the overall unreliability of the article, I would like to provide a very brief summary of the basic rulings related to the purity of dogs, keeping dogs, and keeping dogs inside the house.

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