Using medicines manufactured from animal products

Question

Praise be to Allah.

The production of medicines
from non-animal sources may be of two types:

1.Where they are made from permissible materials, so they are permissible,
such as making them from permissible herbs.

2.Where they are made from materials which are haraam (forbidden)
or naajis (impure), so the medicine is haraam according to the consensus
of the fuqahaa’, because the Prophet

(peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: “Allaah does not put
your cure in that which He has forbidden to you.” (narrated by al-Bukhaari
in a mu’allaq report; al-Fath, vol. 1, p. 78)

See al-Mawsoo’ah al-Fiqhiyyah,
vol. 11, p. 118

If the medicine is made
from animal sources, it may be one of three types:

1.If it comes from an animal whose meat may be eaten and it has
been slaughtered correctly, then it is permissible to use it as medicine.

2.If it comes from an animal whose meat may be eaten but it has
not been slaughtered correctly, then it is not permissible to use it
for medicine, because it is haraam. The Prophet

(peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: “Allaah does not put
your cure in that which He has forbidden to you.” (Narrated by al-Bukhaari
in his Saheeh, in a mu’allaq report from Ibn Mas’ood (may
Allaah be pleased with him), in Kitaab al-Ashribah).

3.If it comes from an animal whose meat cannot be eaten, then it
is not permissible to use it as medicine, for the reasons stated above.
This includes pork.

Ibn Qudaamah (may Allaah
have mercy on him) said: “Section: it is not permissible to treat disease
with haraam things, or anything that contains haraam things, such as
the milk of female donkeys, or the meat of something that is haraam,
or to drink wine in order to treat disease, because the Prophet

(peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: ‘Allaah does not put
the cure for my ummah in that which He has forbidden to them.’ And the
Prophet

(peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said, when he was told about
nabeedh (date wine) that was used for medicinal purposes, ‘It
is not a cure, it is a disease.’” (al-Mughni, vol. 9, p. 338)

Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyah
(may Allaah have mercy on him) said in al-Fataawa al-Kubra
(vol. 3, p. 6): “Question: is it permissible to treat disease with alcohol?

The answer:

Treating disease with alcohol
is haraam, as stated by the Messenger of Allaah

(peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him). This is the view of the
vast majority of scholars. It was narrated in al-Saheeh that
he was asked about alcohol that was made for medicinal purposes, and
he said: ‘It is a disease, it is not a cure.’ And in al-Sunan
it is narrated that he said: ‘It is forbidden to treat disease with
khabeeth (evil) things.’ Ibn Mas’ood said: ‘Allaah does not put your
cure in that which He has forbidden to you.’ Ibn Hibbaan narrated in
his Saheeh that the Prophet

(peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: ‘Allaah does not put
the cure for my ummah in that which He has forbidden to them.’ In al-Sunan
it is narrated that he was asked about frogs which were used for medicinal
purposes. He forbade killing them, and said, ‘Their croaking is tasbeeh
(glorification of Allaah).’

This is not like eating
dead meat out of necessity, for that achieves the purpose of keeping
the person alive when he has no alternative; eating it in this case
is obligatory, and if a person is forced by necessity to eat dead meat,
but he does not eat it and dies as a result, he will go to Hell. But
in the case of treating disease, the cure is not certain and this is
not the only medicine which one may take, rather Allaah may bring about
a person’s recovery through a variety of means. Treating disease is
not obligatory according to the majority of scholars, so there is no
analogy in this case. And Allaah knows best.

Based on the above, the
answer to the second question is as follows:

2 – it is not permissible
for a doctor to use haraam medications in treating disease.

And Allaah knows best.