Question: My Shaikh, there are two types of alcohol as the specialists say: Methyl Alcohol and Ethyl Alcohol. One of them is an intoxicant and the other is a poison. Is a little amount of poison that can kill considered unlawful?
Answer: “if the affair is as you reported with an authentic chain, then they are not the same because there is a difference between an intoxicant and a non-intoxicant. Our speech is about alcohol which intoxicates. If it is another type which I have yet to memorize its name, it is a poison and not an intoxicant. So it does not enter into what we presented now. For example, there is a matter as you know better than us classified in the category of the anesthetics and is not classified under the intoxicants. So the anesthetics do not tread the course of the intoxicants and it is not treated with the treatment of intoxicants because we have a hadith about the intoxicants:
مَا أَسْكَرَ كَثِيرُهُ فَقَلِيلُهُ حَرَامٌ
Whatever causes intoxication in large amounts, a small amount of it is (also) unlawful
[Reported in Sunan Abu Dawood and graded as Hasan Saheeh by Al-Albani in Saheeh Sunan Abi Dawood no. 3681]
We do not have about anesthetics something like this text, i.e., what intoxicates in large amounts then a small amount is unalwful. We do not have anything in this at all. Verily we are only capable of saying whatever harms from these anesthetics is unlawful relying on the statement of the Prophet (ﷺ) :
لاَ ضَرَرَ وَلاَ ضِرَارَ
There should be neither harming nor reciprocating harm
[Reported in Sunan Ibn Majah and Graded Saheeh li Ghairhi by Al-Albani in Saheeh Ibn Majah no. 1910]
So like that, it is obligatory that we differentiate between an anesthetic and an intoxicant and we give each of them their befitting ruling…”
[Taken from Silsilatul-Huda wan-noor no. 85]
Translated by
Faisal Ibn Abdul Qaadir Ibn Hassan
Abu Sulaymaan
