Sariyyat al-Khabat and the Whale of the Shore

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

At some point before the Treaty of al-Ḥudaybiyyah, the Prophet ﷺ sent another large force of 300 men under Abū ʿUbaydah ʿĀmir ibn al-Jarrāḥ to intercept a Qurashī caravan. The caravan evaded them, and the pursuit left the army stranded with dwindling supplies. Abū ʿUbaydah collected all remaining food and rationed it equally among the men, the allotment shrinking day by day until it reached a single date per person, and then nothing at all. Jābir ibn ʿAbdullāh, whose account is preserved in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and elsewhere, describes the Companions sucking on collected date pits and drinking water alongside them for a residual taste, and eventually resorting to khabaṭ, the dried, withered leaves of thorn shrubs, simply to survive, giving the expedition its name (Sariyyat al-Khabaṭ).

Reaching the coast near what is now the town of Yanbuʿ, they discovered an enormous beached whale, described in the narrations in terms suggesting one of the largest creatures on earth, likely a species of great whale. Reports describe as many as thirteen or fourteen Companions sitting together inside the socket of a single eye, and Abū ʿUbaydah riding the tallest available camel underneath an arched rib bone without needing to lower his head. Overjoyed at the unexpected provision after near-starvation, the army camped there for a full month, eating from the carcass and recovering their strength, before packing the remaining meat and returning to Madinah.

❧THE RULING ON SEAFOOD

Uncertain whether it was permissible to have eaten an animal that died naturally rather than being slaughtered or actively caught, the Companions asked the Prophet ﷺ directly. He asked whether any meat remained, requested a piece, and ate it himself, by most accounts the only recorded instance of the Prophet ﷺ eating seafood, specifically to demonstrate its permissibility beyond any doubt. He then stated that two dead animals are permitted without slaughter: locusts and fish (أُحِلَّتْ لَنَا مَيْتَتَانِ وَدَمَانِ، فَأَمَّا الْمَيْتَتَانِ فَالْجَرَادُ وَالْحُوتُ) (understanding "fish" here broadly to include sea creatures generally), deliberately naming the largest possible sea creature to establish that if something of that scale is permissible, smaller sea creatures are permissible with even less question.

Dr. Qadhi connects this directly to Sūrat al-Mā'idah 5:96, which permits "the game of the sea and its food" as a provision for travelers (أُحِلَّ لَكُمْ صَيْدُ الْبَحْرِ وَطَعَامُهُ مَتَاعًا لَكُمْ وَلِلسَّيَّارَةِ), noting Abū Bakr's explanation that this covers both what is actively caught and what the sea casts up already dead. On this basis, the majority of the schools of law, with the Ḥanafī school alone taking a more restrictive position, hold that all creatures native to the sea, whether shrimp, crab, squid, eel, or otherwise, are permissible regardless of how they came to be caught or found, since a whale itself is technically a mammal rather than a fish, yet the Prophet ﷺ still ate of it without requiring any method of slaughter.