Is Avoiding Harmful Food Shirk?

Question

Question: In “Taqwiyat al-Iman” it is written in one place that one should not say that eating or drinking such-and-such a thing caused harm and this illness resulted from it — saying so is shirk, [since] all benefit and harm come from Allah. But Zayd has an experience repeated hundreds of times: whenever he eats anything sour, a burning begins in his eyelids and his eye becomes like a diseased one; and when he eats turnip, red lentils or pigeon peas, a burning immediately occurs at the mouth of his stomach; and…

Answer

Nothing can have an effect except by Allah's permission, so no thing is effective by itself. If someone believes that a thing is effective by itself, that is shirk; but [regarding] a thing as effective by Allah's permission is not shirk.

Source: Fatawa Mahmudiyya

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