What is the ruling on meat that comes from lands of disbelief, such as Bulgaria?

The questioner : Is it true that he sat in one of the mosques in a circle of knowledge, a session of learning, and one of the brothers asked about Bulgarian meat two years ago? The point is that the one who was asked, who is the scholar there, considered it in the session and said: "This is forbidden."

The Shaykh : May Allah reward you with good.

The questioner : I tried to contact the Ministry of Awqaf and spoke with one of the senior officials. A conversation took place between us about whether Bulgarian meat is forbidden. He said: "No, it is not forbidden." I asked: "What is the evidence?" He said: "The evidence is that we receive a certificate stamped by the legal judge of Bulgaria."

The Shaykh : What Allah willed.

The questioner : He said: "And we summoned the judge's assistant, the one who acts on his behalf from Bulgaria, and he came here to Jordan. He told me that I sat with him in a place and asked him, from my own mouth, not his, how the animals are slaughtered and sent to Jordan. He said: 'The Bulgarian judge or mufti supervises the slaughter, and if he is absent, I fill his place.' He said: 'And for us here, this certificate that comes to us is sufficient.' I said to him: 'As citizens, your certificate is sufficient for us; your certificate suffices us, and we rely on your certificate.' So the point I made is that I told him: If Bulgarian meat is forbidden, nothing prevents the preachers, guides, and imams from standing on the pulpit during the Friday sermon and hinting to the people: 'O brothers, this is forbidden, do not eat it.' Then he would have enjoining good and forbidding evil, and the people and the scholar who buys it would understand. He said: 'No one can do that.' Well, then it becomes that you feed the people forbidden food, and you...

The Shaykh : No one can do that? Who said that?

The questioner : The imam, the imam of the mosque who goes up to deliver the sermon, is not authorized to say this.

The Shaykh : Who says that?

The questioner : Is that what I heard from them?

The Shaykh : Is that how it is?

The questioner : No, the Awqaf. He said the Awqaf said: If it were forbidden, we would have hinted to the imams who deliver sermons, and they would have said it is forbidden. He said it is not forbidden, it is lawful. So from here... from here we want you, may Allah reward you with good, to clarify, because there is...The Shaykh : Abdullah al-Sadiqi, have you perhaps heard of him?

The Shaykh : Yes.

The questioner : He held a seminar in Jabal al-Zour about two or three weeks ago, and I attended it. They asked him, and he said that all meat coming from Europe and the communist countries is forbidden. He said: "There is nothing lawful at all."

The Shaykh : May Allah increase his good.

The questioner : They said to him: "The food of the People of the Book." He said: "These people now do not slaughter according to the method of the People of the Book."

Another questioner : I, two days ago... I swear by Allah, it happened to me that I bought a can of beans, a can of beans, and it was written on it: "Slaughtered according to the Islamic method." Yes, this is meat, and it is beans; they slaughter the beans according to the Islamic method.

Another questioner : In Bulgaria, about a quarter or half a million Turks emigrated from Bulgaria; the Bulgarians expelled the Muslim Turks. I mean, they object by saying that there are no Muslims in Bulgaria who come to slaughter it. Is it not permissible for the contractor to be a Jordanian contractor from here who imports from there, and he stipulates, for example, that the workers are Muslim Turks who slaughter it? Is it not permissible for the contractor, I mean a Jordanian contractor from here who imports from there, to stipulate, for example, that the workers are not Muslim Turks who slaughter it, or something like that? Or I mean, O our master...The Shaykh : As a citizen who is careful to apply the Sunnah and the Islamic Shari'ah, am I required to investigate this meat in Bulgaria in order to eat it, for example, or is the certificate of the authorities present here sufficient for me? And may Allah reward you with good.

The Shaykh : First, my brother, its interpretation, may Allah reward you with good, its interpretation according to the scholars of tafsir is: their slaughter. Participating in the slaughter of a non-Muslim requires two conditions. The first condition is that the slaughterer is from the People of the Book, and the other condition is that he slaughtered it by slaughter, not by killing. And whatever is not slaughtered by slaughter is killing, whatever the method of killing is. We now return to looking at the realization of these two conditions in Bulgarian meat. First, the Bulgarians today, as a nation represented by their rulers, have departed from being People of the Book, like the Soviets. And this, of course, does not negate that there are many individuals in the population who remain Christian, but the ruling is in the hands of the rulers who are not Christians but are atheists. Then, no doubt, we see in every country that those who have employees are of their kind and of their religion, so it is likely that these slaughters we call slaughters are from the slaughter of Bulgarians who are not Christians but are communists. So the least that can be said is that we are in great doubt, if we do not say by preponderance of opinion, that those who slaughter, if we assume they slaughter, are not from the People of the Book. I say cautiously: we are in doubt about them being from the People of the Book. Is that clear up to here?

The questioner : Yes.

The Shaykh : Well, the second condition remains, which is slaughter. Suppose those who slaughter are from the People of the Book, do they slaughter by slaughter or kill by killing? All those who go to the West countries testify and know that Europeans cannot slaughter by lawful slaughter, and that is for two reasons.
The first is that, as our Lord, Mighty and Majestic, said in the Noble Qur'an: . So they have nothing called lawful and nothing called forbidden. So they do not forbid or permit. If they were from the People of the Book, they would have something called lawful and something called forbidden. Since the matter is so, it is not sufficient for the one who supervises the slaughter to be a person of the Book, but it is necessary that he has slaughtered it by lawful slaughter.
So I said: The doubt comes, the doubt at least comes in the second condition from the side that these Christians do not forbid or permit. So what do they do? They take the matter from the nearest path. And they enter it from the nearest door, which is of material benefit to them.
We truly know that the group has been overcome by material life, and Allah, Mighty and Majestic, has branded them since ancient times when the Lord of the Worlds said in the Noble Qur'an: . Ah. So lawful slaughter, as we know by experience, takes a long time. This time has a price for them, a very high price, and therefore they kill the animal intended for eating by the nearest path, not by the Islamic method, because this takes time, unlike what? Their method.
I said: Those who go to those countries know that Europeans do not slaughter but kill by killing. I personally have a simple experience. It was decreed for me that I traveled to Britain and traveled to Spain. In Britain, we stayed with some Muslim brothers from India whom we had met in some Umrahs in Jeddah, so we got to know him. And when we went to London, the man was to receive us, may Allah reward him with good, and we stayed with him. We learned that his profession is butchery and that he has a slaughterhouse according to the Islamic method. After we looked around, look at the time it takes to slaughter according to the Islamic method, with the mechanical means available today in this time. We entered a place with a courtyard and a space, and on the right an entrance that leads us to the sheep pens. A man came out and took the flock from this pen, head after head, then he goes to a place a little far from the pen, and there are two people, one specialized in taking the animal and tying it well with his hands, and the other slaughters it with the mention of Allah's name. And barely does the blood begin to flow in an organized channel before this animal is hung by hooks, what do you call these?

The questioner : Hooks.

The Shaykh : No other name.

The questioner : Hooks.

The Shaykh : Dogs, ah, … and this animal is tied to the dogs, and they push it with a shove like this. Let us assume the slaughter was done here, and they push it like that toward something, say eight meters away. It walks in a track, then turns behind this wall, for example. We are happy, we are just watching, and when it arrives, it arrives at a person waiting for the animal to come to him. If it does not come to him, it is at rest; there is no spirit in it at all, it has cooled down, meaning. So they start, what? They peel the skin off the body; that is his only job. So if he has peeled the skin off the body, he throws the skin into a barrel, and then they give it the final push. The final push involves two people there: one person cuts open the belly and extracts the entrails and the stomach, the tripe, and so on. When the second person finishes his job, he takes the pump, opens it, and it is very strong water, and he washes it, what? The slaughtered animal, a complete washing. So when it becomes shiny from cleanliness, they give it the final push and it goes to the scale. They record there, every slaughtered animal, how many kilos, this is for their calculation, of course. This slaughter, as you see, stages, takes a lot of time. Our companion told us that the English themselves now buy from him from these slaughters, because they know that these slaughters, from the medical point of view, are more beneficial and healthier than those slaughters that they slaughter. And he told us that every day he slaughters seven hundred heads of sheep, every day… from the Muslims… and he also has a poultry farm and slaughters them in the same way, meaning I did not attend, but it is a very imaginary number, thousands and thousands of chickens. This is the experience we saw in Britain, and we saw the British themselves accepting these slaughters because of their knowledge that their slaughters are not healthy, let alone being what? Islamic slaughters. As for what I noticed in Spain myself, we entered the market and found the glass boxes that are refrigerated and air-conditioned, and the slaughtered chickens are placed in them. So the chickens are seen with their heads, and there is no slaughter. The chickens are placed in this glass box, and the person who buys a chicken with its head, and it is not slaughtered, so these were strangled, strangled as we hear, meaning. So if we know these facts through the experiences of many people and the experiences of some few people like me, at the least this casts a doubt, it casts a doubt that these slaughters are slaughtered in the Islamic way. How can they slaughter in the Islamic way when they do not forbid what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, and they do not follow the religion of truth? If we say, by Allah, commercial interest is important, it is not their interest in this way, because this takes a long time, and a very long time, and we will start, oh, and they do not care about their material ruin and the material gain in which they do not heed the forbidden or the lawful. Second, other experiences that happened to many people. I heard just now something that makes one laugh and cry at the same time. That a can of beans is written on it. But perhaps you heard that the fish used to go to Saudi Arabia and it was written on it, slaughtered in the Islamic way. So this has become the fashion of the present age to deceive the Muslims, it is written on everything, in the Islamic way. From the perspective of what? Advertising.
We return now to what concerns us, the Muslims. The story you told, and this in reality we take it anew as a means so that we do not feel reassured about these slaughters. Your companion whom you spoke with says that.