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What is the ruling on eating horse meat?

1 min readAlso available in العربية

Most scholars have gone to the permissibility of eating horse meat, due to the authentic hadiths from Jabir ibn Abdullah and Asma bint Abi Bakr. Others, including Abu Hanifa, have gone to its detestability, citing His saying, the Almighty: "And (He created) horses, mules, and donkeys for you to ride and as an adornment." And a weak hadith from Khalid ibn al-Walid. The answer given regarding the verse is that mentioning riding and adornment does not mean restricting benefit to them, and regarding the hadith, it is due to its weakness, instability, inconsistency and its contradiction to the authentic hadiths.

Summarized from the full answer at Ftawy · reviewed Sep 2, 2026

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