A sister who has just finished studying homeopathic medicine and who is now practicing has the following questions :



1. Can Muslims use animal organs/products for medicine? For example, injectable insulin made from pig tissue/medicine containing liver from cows or other organs from cows. Also what about medicines which contain extracts from animal hormones?


2. Can a Muslim doctor administer the above medicines to Muslims or non-Muslims?

Praise be to Allaah.


The production of medicines from non-animal sources may be of two types:

1. Where they are made from permissible materials, so they are permissible, such as making them from permissible herbs.

2. Where they are made from materials which are haraam (forbidden) or naajis (impure), so the medicine is haraam according to the consensus of the fuqahaa’, because the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: “Allaah does not put your cure in that which He has forbidden to you.” (narrated by al-Bukhaari in a mu’allaq report; al-Fath, vol. 1, p. 78)

See al-Mawsoo’ah al-Fiqhiyyah, vol. 11, p. 118

If the medicine is made from animal sources, it may be one of three types:

1. If it comes from an animal whose meat may be eaten and it has been slaughtered correctly, then it is permissible to use it as medicine.

2. If it comes from an animal whose meat may be eaten but it has not been slaughtered correctly, then it is not permissible to use it for medicine, because it is haraam. The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: “Allaah does not put your cure in that which He has forbidden to you.” (Narrated by al-Bukhaari in his Saheeh, in a mu’allaq report from Ibn Mas’ood (may Allaah be pleased with him), in Kitaab al-Ashribah).

3. If it comes from an animal whose meat cannot be eaten, then it is not permissible to use it as medicine, for the reasons stated above. This includes pork.

Ibn Qudaamah (may Allaah have mercy on him) said: “Section: it is not permissible to treat disease with haraam things, or anything that contains haraam things, such as the milk of female donkeys, or the meat of something that is haraam, or to drink wine in order to treat disease, because the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: ‘Allaah does not put the cure for my ummah in that which He has forbidden to them.’ And the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said, when he was told about nabeedh (date wine) that was used for medicinal purposes, ‘It is not a cure, it is a disease.’” (al-Mughni, vol. 9, p. 338)

Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyah (may Allaah have mercy on him) said in al-Fataawa al-Kubra (vol. 3, p. 6): “Question: is it permissible to treat disease with alcohol?

The answer:

Treating disease with alcohol is haraam, as stated by the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him). This is the view of the vast majority of scholars. It was narrated in al-Saheeh that he was asked about alcohol that was made for medicinal purposes, and he said: ‘It is a disease, it is not a cure.’ And in al-Sunan it is narrated that he said: ‘It is forbidden to treat disease with khabeeth (evil) things.’ Ibn Mas’ood said: ‘Allaah does not put your cure in that which He has forbidden to you.’ Ibn Hibbaan narrated in his Saheeh that the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: ‘Allaah does not put the cure for my ummah in that which He has forbidden to them.’ In al-Sunan it is narrated that he was asked about frogs which were used for medicinal purposes. He forbade killing them, and said, ‘Their croaking is tasbeeh (glorification of Allaah).’

This is not like eating dead meat out of necessity, for that achieves the purpose of keeping the person alive when he has no alternative; eating it in this case is obligatory, and if a person is forced by necessity to eat dead meat, but he does not eat it and dies as a result, he will go to Hell. But in the case of treating disease, the cure is not certain and this is not the only medicine which one may take, rather Allaah may bring about a person's recovery through a variety of means. Treating disease is not obligatory according to the majority of scholars, so there is no analogy in this case. And Allaah knows best.

Based on the above, the answer to the second question is as follows:

2 – it is not permissible for a doctor to use haraam medications in treating disease.

And Allaah knows