Science, islam, atheism
Why Did Allah Prohibit Pork But Not Beef?
A Medical Case Against Islamic Dietary Law
Eid-ul-Adha comes with animals. I remember roaming around in the “ Bakra mandi “ outside the city as a child, until I got groped a few times. From then on I would wait at home. The joy I felt taking care of the animal. The sounds, the smell, the excitement. I fed them and walked them every evening. Year after year, as prices inflated, the goat became smaller, until my parents could not afford a goat and we would pool money with neighbors to buy a cow. The neighborhood children would dote on the cow each year, piece together ornate cow bells and even put henna on them. The attachment was always a mistake but we made it every year.
The morning of slaughter would come regardless.
The sadness came fast. My mother used to be ready for it. She said it is our sacrifice that reaches God. The grief means you gave something dear. That was the whole point. We would nod with teary eyes. She would head to the kitchen. We would carry meat bags to other houses with sad eyes, navigating the blood flowing in the street.
In a bit, the house would come alive with aroma.
Liver fried with garlic, jalapeños and spices was the first thing my mother cooked. The smell reached us before the grief had finished its work. By the time my uncle had seekh kababs on the grill, praising the freshness of the meat the way only someone who watched it walk that morning can, the animal had already become something else. Food. Celebration. Obedience rendered delicious.
I remember the evening when a different uncle waved the plate of seekh kababs away. He explained the risk of mad cow disease as the room full of doctors laughed at his paranoia. My father grabbed his plate and joked about living on the edge. Another uncle ate the nihari and declared it worth the heart attack. My aunt ate the seekh kababs, but politely declined the fried brain, maghaz masala, when offered by my mother. She wondered aloud why no one was worried about prion disease.
Nobody connected any of this to theology. It was personal caution. Individual risk calculation. Every single person in that room was a physician. If you know South Asian families, that is unusual but not rare.
The tradition that mandated the feast had nothing to say about what my aunt already knew. She was more medically informed than the revelation.
Growing up, I was surrounded by people who explained the dietary restrictions in Islam in terms of divine foresight. They didn’t simply accept the prohibition as a divine command but tried to find logic in it. My father, a highly educated man, insisted that the pig is dirty, carries disease, and Allah protected us from it before we had the tools to understand why. People around me, who tended to explain facts logically instead of just calling them blind obedience, were convinced of the divine wisdom.
When the nihari joke didn’t sit right, I went to my father. If beef causes so many diseases, why did Allah not warn us?
He had no answer. What he produced were apologetics. Moderation, he said. Different times. Have faith in Allah.
Moderation is not the logic applied to pork. Pork carries no serving size, no risk threshold, no clinical advisory. The Quran addresses it in four verses, 2:173, 5:3, 6:145, and 16:115, without qualification, without a permissible quantity, without a harm reduction framework. The same divine wisdom produced no prohibition on beef.
Have faith in Allah is the sound a framework makes when it has no answer and cannot admit it. My father spent his career on the premise that evidence updates practice. He applied that standard to everything except the dinner table.
Pork consumption can cause infection with Trichinella spiralis, the parasite responsible for trichinosis. Larvae of Taenia solium, the pork tapeworm, can migrate to the human brain and cause neurocysticercosis.
The apologetic argument is that Allah knew this before science did. A 7th-century prohibition that anticipated parasitological and viral risks before science had names for them.
The same argument is often presented for alcohol. Its prohibition rests on the harm it causes such as fat accumulation, inflammation, fibrosis, and cirrhosis.
Overuse of fructose and other sugars travels similar metabolic pathways through the same liver and produces a similar cascade. Honey is approximately 40% fructose and 30% glucose. The tradition that prohibited alcohol endorsed honey as shifa, a Quranic cure for people, without that caveat. Like honey, alcohol has documented medicinal uses. It is an antiseptic, a solvent, anxiolytic, component of tinctures and medications across centuries of pharmacology. Yet, it was prohibited absolutely. Honey causes the same liver pathology as the prohibited substance with the similar caveat of overuse. It has a fraction of the medicinal applications, and yet was written into the Quran as a cure. The omniscience that sorted these two got them backwards.
Apologists cite Hepatitis E in pigs. If God had knowledge of zoonotic transmission of Hepatitis E through pigs, such transmission can also occur through camels and deer. Sheep can transmit Q-fever and Rift Valley fever to humans. In fact, hadith makes handling sheep the sacred profession of the Prophets, with no warning about Rift Valley fever. Yet, they all remain halal.
Islam used its available update mechanism to discourage smoking. There was no tobacco in 7 thcentury and smoking is not explicitly mentioned in Quran or Hadith. Despite difference of opinion, consensus in three out of four schools hold the view that smoking is prohibited due to harmful effects on health.
The same logic has not been applied to beef, sheep, lamb, and camels because the tradition explicitly allows them. Then the question becomes unavoidable. What did Allah not know about beef if he knew about the dangers of pork? What health effects did alcohol have that honey did not? Are these prohibitions rooted in divine knowledge or available norms of 7th century?
Saturated fatty acids in red meat raise LDL cholesterol. LDL deposits in arterial walls. Ischemic heart disease follows. It is the single leading cause of death globally, killing approximately millions of people every year. The dietary contribution of red meat to this burden is documented across decades of longitudinal cohort studies on multiple continents.
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The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified red meat as Group 2A in 2015: probably carcinogenic to humans. Processed red meat landed in Group 1: the same category as tobacco smoke.
Like pork, beef consumption can also transmit parasites to human body, some of which can travel to brain. Taenia saginata is the beef tapeworm. Toxoplasma Gondii can cause neurological symptoms very similar to Taenia solium.
E. coli O157:H7 is a shiga toxin-producing strain transmitted through undercooked ground beef. In severe cases it causes hemolytic uremic syndrome leading to kidney failure and death. Children are most vulnerable.
Then there is the prion. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy crosses the species barrier and becomes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. It is 100% fatal. The incubation period spans decades. Prions survive cooking and standard sterilization.
Despite a long list of diseases it contributes to, beef is halal. The Eid sacrifice is predominantly cattle across much of the Muslim world. It carries no Quranic prohibition. The tradition does not merely permit beef. It consecrates it. My aunt did not touch the maghaz masala. She knew what the revelation didn’t.
Interestingly, a while back Dr. Zakir Naik claimed that pigs are ‘shameless animals’ because they invite their ‘friends’ to have sex with their mate. This claim has circulated widely as a justification of the divine law. Pigs are no more promiscuous than goat, sheep, and cow. They are also clean animals who tend to not soil where they sleep when they are in the wild, compared to cows who excrete waste indiscriminately.
The God who prohibited pork did not prohibit beef. He mandated the slaughter of cattle upon whoever can afford it. Practically, for most families it is easier to pool money and buy a cow, where one animal counts as seven sacrifices. A timeless God who would have known how economics will play out endorsed it.
Babylonian wisdom literature from the 8th century BCE labels pigs as unclean and reviled by the sun god Shamash, while pigs were still being raised and eaten in everyday Babylonian life. The cultic pollution category for swine existed centuries before Leviticus was compiled or Muhammad was born. Ancient Egypt maintained its own pork taboo applied initially to the priestly class and sacralized downward from there.
The Israelite prohibition codified what ecology had already decided. Pigs require shade, water, and forested environments. The Levantine highlands and the Arabian Peninsula provided none of these. A mobile pastoral community cannot raise pigs, and compete with humans for food rather than converting inedible pasture into protein. Pre-scientific regulatory systems do not have nutritional science. They use purity codes.
Then the political dimension hardened it. Pig bones appeared at Philistine archaeological sites. They were absent from contemporaneous Israelite settlements. Pork consumption marked you as them. The biblical authors crystallized an ethnic dietary boundary into divine mandate, with the political function of shoring up communal identity.
Muhammad inherited this prohibition from a Semitic tradition with fifteen centuries of institutional momentum. The health rationale was constructed afterward.
The structural overlap between halal and kashrut is too systematic to be convergence.
The prohibited categories are near-identical. The slaughter methodology, and the invocation requirement mirrors the same logic.
The Quran’s own text confirms the inheritance. Verse 5:5 explicitly permits Muslims to eat the slaughtered meat of Jews and Christians. The tradition could not deny the structural equivalence of shechita and dhabihah, so it institutionalized it.
The divergences reveal the editing. Meat-dairy separation was dropped. The shellfish prohibition was dropped. The sciatic nerve restriction was dropped. Alcohol was added. The pattern is a modified kashrut with the Jewish architecture partially obscured but structurally intact, including its unresolved ambiguities.
A timeless God legislating for all of humanity across all centuries would have known that 7th-century slaughter conventions would eventually meet industrial processing, global supply chains, and supermarkets on four continents. He failed to build in precision. In the 7th century, in the community where these rules were adopted, the framework worked fine. Nobody needed a certification agency. Everyone knew the slaughterer. The rules were adequate for that world. They were not designed for any other. Muslims are still fighting over hand-cut zabiha versus machine-cut versus the halal-certified sticker on the Western grocery store shelf, just as Jewish communities have spent centuries debating certification standards they cannot agree on. It is a problem a timeless God would have seen coming.
The global halal food market is currently valued at $2.3 trillion. The halal certification market is valued at approximately $4.8 billion to $10.7 billion. It is projected to scale rapidly to over $11.5 billion to $21.6 billion by 2033 with a 9–10% CAGR.
Under Indonesian law, foreign halal certificates are not readily accepted. Malaysia’s JAKIM has previously revoked recognition for prominent groups like the China Islamic Association (CIA), the Centre for Halal Quality Certification (CHQC) in Croatia, and the Great Mosque of Lyon (ARGML) in France. The UK’s Halal Food Authority and the Halal Monitoring Committee hold incompatible positions on machine-slaughtered poultry and both issue halal certificates. Approximately 90% of halal-certified meat in the United Kingdom comes from stunned animals. A significant portion of Muslims buying halal-labeled products are, by classical standards, eating meat the tradition classifies as haram. I have visited a food processing plant in the West, where the only difference between meat labeled halal versus not was a recording of adhan in the background. I have also witnessed butchers in Pakistan slaughtering animals in extremely unhygienic conditions with no regard to food safety. I know which one I would choose.
The certification bodies charge fees. Manufacturers want access to the halal consumer market. The incentives align in a direction that does not track theological rigor. Apparently, divine law requires a $10 billion certification apparatus to remain coherent.
I am a foodie. I cooked biryani last week, picture below, and have no intention of stopping. I buy my meat where I want and care about little but hygiene. I infused my onions in red wine instead of vinegar and served them on the same dinner table.
I do not eat biryani as an act of obedience to a divine taxonomy that sorted the safe from the dangerous. I do not avoid pork because Allah anticipated trichinosis. I do not eat beef because he missed the prion. I eat what I eat as a person with access to nutritional science, food safety infrastructure, and two centuries of accumulated medical knowledge, a more reliable guide to what belongs on my plate than a 7th-century inheritance encoded as eternal law.
The law perhaps worked for its time. It discouraged domesticating animals that compete with humans for resources. It reduced the behavioral risks associated with intoxication. Maybe it all made sense then.
The context no longer exists. Refrigeration, food inspection infrastructure, and veterinary oversight have transformed the risk calculus entirely. The rules could have adapted. They cannot, because they are not rules. They are revelation which cannot be updated without conceding that the original was incomplete.
The dietary law is not the problem. The claim of timelessness attached to it is. The guilt that goes with the framework, the surveillance feeling when you eat something ‘haram’ or ‘makrooh’. The false virtue when you eat something halal. Neither is earned.
My mother said the grief meant we had sacrificed something dear. She was right about that part. What we gave, over years of Eids and dinners and unanswered questions at the table, was the assumption that someone else had already worked this out for us.
The biryani does not need God’s permission. It never did.
Originally published at https://nushuz.substack.com on May 11, 2026.
