The Prophet Muhammad taught kindness to animals as well as to people. He was gentle with cats, the familiar animals of the home, forbade cruelty to them and stressed their care. Writing in Desh Rupantor, Ahmad Abdur Rafi draws these lessons from the hadith.
In a hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari, the Prophet said a woman was sent to Hell because she tied up a cat, gave it neither food nor water, and would not let it go to find food for itself. The lesson, the writer says, is that denying an animal its rights is a sin.
In a narration from Anas ibn Malik recorded by al-Tabarani, the Prophet once saw a cat drink from his ablution water and still used the water for wudu, saying the cat is one of the animals that move about the house and does not make anything impure.
From this, jurists hold that water a cat has drunk from is not impure. Using it for wudu when other clean water is available is makruh tanzihi, better avoided, but wudu and prayer performed with it are both valid.
The writer calls the cats in the Prophet's life a humane chapter, and says these hadith show how much weight Islam gives to animal welfare: feeding and watering the animals around us and never confining them to suffer are part of a Muslim's duty.
Photo: A cat outside the Gazi Husrev-Bey Mosque in Sarajevo, Jennifer Boyer / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Source: Desh Rupantor
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