Cannabis In Islam: Halal Or Haram?

What is cannabis, why is it relevant to the Muslim community in the West, and is cannabis consumption even Halal (arabic for “permissible” under Islamic law) ? Is this a modern debate within the Muslim community, or a tale as old as our religion itself? What are Islamic scholars saying about cannabis consumption and industry?

Are the health benefits true or is there no value to the plant? What can you do if you know someone whose developed an unhealthy habit?

Abbas Mohamed, Co-Host of The Artistic Foodies Podcast, sits with all these questions in his discussion with Ishaq Ali, a cannabis industry veteran and co-founder of Halal Hemp.

Here are some interesting quotes from the interview:

Ishaq Ali: There was a doctor who goes by the name of Dr. G in Malaysia who essentially used cannabis medicine as a form of relief for cancer patients and other folks who had terminal illnesses. He was caught, he was put on death row, and a lot of people were really, really upset about that.

Jamida took on the sort of mantle of really spotlighting this issue and saying that this is a problem. In Islam, we shouldn’t be killing people for something like cannabis when they’re using it as medicine, when they’re using it to share with their community, when they’re using it for the betterment of their own society.

And so when she moved to the United States, she found my article. She found the article that had written about cannabis in Islam, and she was like, I’ve never met anyone else in the Muslim world that’s been so open about these two concepts, about connecting the two.

And so through her research, she had found that the North American Fiqh Council (under the umbrella of ISNA – Islamic Society of North America) had passed a fatwa (Islamic legal ruling) saying that cannabis is halal under certain medical circumstances. And through that, the research that I had done and the burgeoning industry, we thought that this is a really interesting sort of cross section for us to get involved in.

That right now, currently, at least at the time, there was little to no representation of Muslims in the cannabis industry. And there’s very little education for Muslims about cannabis. And so we wanted to essentially bridge that gap.

Not only are we Muslims that are representing the community in the cannabis industry, but also we wanted to bring the education, de -stigmatization, de -mystification of cannabis back to the Muslim community.

Tune into The Artistic Foodies podcast for a deep dive into this topic, and journey with us as we explore these questions. Listen to the full episode by clicking on the link below: