What is the ruling on keeping cats?
Machine translationRead the Arabic original
Question:
He says: Honorable Shaykh, what is the ruling on keeping cats, as Abu Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him) did?
Answer:
There is nothing wrong with it; keeping cats is permissible. This is evidenced by the hadith of the woman who entered the Fire because of a cat she had locked up; she neither fed it nor let it go out to eat from the creatures of the earth. This indicates that if she had fed it and given it water, there would be no harm in keeping it. The cat is one of the roaming animals, and it is not ritually impure; what it drinks from or eats from is not ritually impure, because it is among the animals that roam about people in their homes. If it were ritually impure, that would have been difficult for the Muslims. Yes.
He says: Honorable Shaykh, what is the ruling on keeping cats, as Abu Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him) did?
Answer:
There is nothing wrong with it; keeping cats is permissible. This is evidenced by the hadith of the woman who entered the Fire because of a cat she had locked up; she neither fed it nor let it go out to eat from the creatures of the earth. This indicates that if she had fed it and given it water, there would be no harm in keeping it. The cat is one of the roaming animals, and it is not ritually impure; what it drinks from or eats from is not ritually impure, because it is among the animals that roam about people in their homes. If it were ritually impure, that would have been difficult for the Muslims. Yes.
Source
قناة «العلامة الدكتور صالح الفوزان»، ما حكم اقتناء القطط؟ للشيخ صالح الفوزان — youtube.com
The Arabic text is a machine transcription of the audio recording.