Answered by Shaykh Ilyas Patel
I would like to know please whether it is allowed to wear a garment that contains a picture of an animal.
Walaikum assalam wa rahmatullah,
It is mentioned in Tawdih‘ that our scholars and others have stated that it is extremely forbidden to make the picture of an animal and it is from the enormities, whether one makes it and is used in a way that is degraded (i.e. cushion, pillow etc) or not (i.e. as a picture frame etc). It is extremely forbidden as it is like resembling the creation of Allah. It is equal in forbiddance, whether the picture is on a cloth, carpet, dinar, dirham, fils (coin), utensil or wall.
As for something which is not a picture of an animal, like the sea and the like, is not forbidden, whether it has a shadow of it or not. This is what a group of scholars have said, from amongst them being Imam Malik, Sufyan, Abu Hanifa and others (May Allah be pleased with them all).
(Imam Badr al-Din Al-Ayni , Umdat al-Qari 22.70)
And Allah alone gives success.
– Ilyas Patel
It is mentioned in Imam `Ala’ al-Din al-Haskafi’s al-Durr al-Mukhtar that, among the types of pictures that are not prohibited to have are those that are
“(Small) such that the details of their limbs are not apparent to someone who looks down at them standing while they are on the ground, as Halabi mentioned, (or with their head or face cut off) or with an organ effaced out that the body cannot live without, (or of an inanimate object).”
Ibn Abidin clarified in his supercommentary, Radd al-Muhtar,
“(His saying with their head cut off’) That is, whether it did not have a head in the first place, or it had one and it was effaced.” [ Radd al-Muhtar `ala al-Durr al-Mukhtar, Bab ma yufsid al-salat wa ma yukrahu fiha’]