What's on the Menu?

Menu on a poor memory:

The Prophet sallallaahu alayhi wasallam said there are two meals in a day; lobster and crab.

Though I really wouldn't mind that at all, plus all the other stuff the Somali fishermen throw back out to sea after the big catch.

After hours of 50 minutes lectures interspersed by 10 minute breaks, the Sheykh announced that we were going to do an activity.

It was basically like playing the game 'Pass the Message' to members of a group of 6, and have the last person write the message down. With an Islamic twist however, we were supposed to narrate a hadeeth and see how garbled it is by the time it reaches the last person in our group.

I was the second person to in the group, the second to receive the hadeeth from the first person who memorized it as much as she could in a few minutes, and this is what I remember:

Ibn Umar narrated that the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wasallam reported: Two animals are made unlawful to you and two blood are made unlawful to you. The two animals are the locust and _______. The two blood are the spleen and the liver.

Rh had forgotten the second animal. I don't quite exactly know what the last person jot down, because as soon as she did, she passed it down to the Sheykh.

What transpired next was hilarious. As there were many groups in the class, there were many 'rendered' hadeeth from each group.

One particular one really cracked me up:

The Prophet sallallahu alayhi wasallam said there are two meals in a day; the lobster and the crab.

There was another one that was equally funny:

Two animals that are lawful to you is the mucus and .....

You can imagine how bad narrators we all were, and as for strength of memory, ahh...let's just say most of us would fail a memory test.

The actual hadith was,


Abd Allah ibn Umar (Allah be pleased with him) narrates that the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him & give him eternal peace) said: "Two types of dead meat and two types of blood have been made lawful for our consumption: The two dead meats are: fish and locust, and the two types of blood are: liver and spleen." (Sunan Abu Dawud, Musnad Ahmad and Sunan Ibn Majah)


Prior to this activity, the Sheykh had also told us of his uncle who was stuck in Somalia during World War II. He had lived there for a few months, and he had remarked that Somalia had the best food in the world. The Somali fishermen would take all the fish and throw the rest back in the sea. The best food he was referring to were the other catch that were thrown back to sea. let it be known that the Sheykh was born in Vietnam and is an Asian by ethnicity, so just like us Malaysians, seafood is a very savored food item. And from my interactions with my Somali friends here, I also know that they don't eat squids or shrimps, so the anecdote totally stuck in my mind. (This explains the commentary in small font above.)

I'm thinking that maybe I should do this activity with the kids, to demonstrate how powerful the memory of the sahabahs were, though the Sheykh also narrated instances of this in the story of Abu Hurayrah and Imam Bukhari.