Anthrozoös

A multidisciplinary journal of the interactions of people and animals

ISSN: 0892-7936 (Print) 1753-0377 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfan20

L’Animal en Islam

Sarra Tlili

To cite this article: Sarra Tlili (2019) L’Animal en Islam, Anthrozoös, 32:4, 571-573, DOI:
10.1080/08927936.2019.1598666

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08927936.2019.1598666

Published online: 28 Jun 2019.

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BOOK REVIEW

L’Animal en Islam
Mohammed Hocine Benkheira, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, and Jacqueline Sublet. Paris:
Les Indes Savantes, 2005. 186 pages. ISBN: 2-84654-085-3 (hardback)

Reviewed by: Sarra Tlili, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University
of Florida, USA. E-mail: satlili@ufl.edu
DOI: 10.1080/08927936.2019.1598666

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Though one of the earliest works on animal ethics in Islam and a major contribution
to the field, to date L’Animal en Islam has not received the attention that it deserves.
The work is the outcome of a workshop that was held at l’École Pratique des Hautes
Études in Paris during the academic year 2002–2003 and consists of an introduction and five
chapters authored by the three editors. The volume is remarkable in its coverage of primary
sources. The authors limit their scope to the medieval period, central lands of Islam, and Arabic
sources, but within these boundaries they survey an impressively wide range of works from a
variety of genres, including the Qur’an, its exegesis, the Prophetic tradition, legal texts, works
of literature (adab), hagiographies, lexicons, and medical and hunting manuals.
The complexity, ambivalence, and multiplicity of views on animals that inevitably charac-
terize any given tradition are highlighted from the beginning. In an informative introduction,
Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen notes for example how an animal that is cherished as a symbol of
blessings—such as the pigeon—can, by the same token, become a negative symbol of
superstitious beliefs. Such ambivalence and complexity are to be expected, as attitudes toward
animals in Islamic tradition are shaped by multiple sources and factors, including religious
texts, the cultural and intellectual input of the peoples with which Islam came into contact,
and political and economic dynamics.
Despite this ambivalence, Mayeur-Jaouen agrees with preceding and subsequent
observers that overall Islamic tradition fares better than several others in its concern for animals,
yet she also highlights the deterioration of Muslims’ attitudes toward nonhuman creatures in
the modern age, an impact that she attributes to modernization and urbanization on one hand
and to reformist Islam on the other. The latter—itself an urban phenomenon, Mayeur-Jaouen
Anthrozoös

argues—has reinforced negative attitudes by pushing the animal away from the imaginary of
modern Muslims. The first part of Mayeur-Jaouen’s argument has since been developed into
a full-fledged book: Alan Mikhail’s The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2014),
which explicates and documents the process through which modernization and urbanization
have transformed attitudes toward animals in a Muslim-majority country. The second part of
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her argument deserves the same. A cursory survey of Islamic literatures seems indeed to