A blade, sharpened in advance
Quality is decided long before the product exists. It is decided in the preparation, in the tool, and in the heart of the person doing the work.
I have spent most of my career teaching quality engineering, first in Malaysia, then in Birmingham, and now in Tokyo. Over the years I keep returning to one simple image: a knife being sharpened before it is used.
In Islam, that image comes from a hadith about slaughtering an animal. In Japan, it comes from the chef who sharpens his knife every morning before he touches a single fish. Two traditions, separated by geography and theology, arrive at the same small act. This post is about why.
Ihsan: excellence as an act of worship
In Islam, excellence has a name: ihsan. It is not an optional extra for the perfectionist. It is presented as something God has prescribed.
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said, in a hadith narrated by Shaddad ibn Aws and recorded in Sahih Muslim:
“Indeed, Allah has prescribed ihsan in all things. So if you kill, kill well; and if you slaughter, slaughter well. Let each of you sharpen his blade and spare the animal suffering.”
Notice the structure. It opens with a universal principle: ihsan in all things. Then it chooses the hardest possible example, the taking of a life, to show that even there, excellence is required. Then it gets practical: sharpen the blade.
Other narrations go further. The knife should not be sharpened in front of the animal, and one animal should not be slaughtered in sight of another. The concern is not only the outcome, but the experience of the one affected by the process.
The deeper definition comes from the famous Hadith of Jibril: ihsan is “to worship Allah as though you see Him, and if you do not see Him, He sees you.” A related saying adds that Allah loves that when one of us does a work, we do it with itqan, meaning precision and mastery. Excellence, in this view, is what work looks like when you know you are being watched by the One who matters most.
Kodawari: perfection as a way of being
Japan has no single word that maps neatly onto ihsan. But it has a cluster of ideas that point in the same direction.
Shokunin (職人) is the craftsman, but the word carries more than skill. It implies a social obligation to do one’s work as well as it can be done, for the sake of the people who will use it. Kodawari (こだわり) is the relentless, almost stubborn insistence on getting the details right, even details no customer will ever notice. Monozukuri (ものづくり), the art of making things, is the national expression of both.
Walk into any serious sushi counter in Tokyo before service. You will find the itamae sharpening his knives on whetstones, slowly, every single day. A Japanese chef’s knife from Sakai or Seki is ground to an edge so fine that it must be cared for constantly. The sharpening is not preparation for the work. It is the work.
There is an even closer parallel. Japanese fishermen practise ikejime, a method of killing fish instantly by piercing the brain with a spike, then draining the blood. It is done to spare the fish prolonged struggle, because stress spoils the flesh. A quick death, a clean blade, minimal suffering. The language is different, but I hear an echo of Shaddad ibn Aws.
The process before the product
Both traditions locate quality upstream. They do not wait for the product and then inspect it. They pay attention to three things before the work even begins.
- Intention. In Islam, every act begins with niyyah, the intention, and slaughter begins with the name of God. In Japan, the craftsman’s attitude, his kokorogamae (心構え), is treated as part of the craft. A careless heart produces careless work.
- The tool. The sharpened knife is the tool made ready. A dull blade is not a neutral fact; it is a failure of preparation that someone else will pay for, whether the animal or the diner.
- The method. How the knife moves matters as much as how sharp it is. The hadith describes slaughter done well, not merely done. The Japanese talk of kata (型), the correct form, repeated until it becomes second nature.
As a quality engineer, I recognise this immediately. It is the shift that Deming, Juran and Taguchi fought for in the twentieth century: you cannot inspect quality into a product. You must build it into the process. Fourteen centuries earlier, a hadith about a knife was already making the same argument.
Skill: mastery as a lifelong discipline
A sharp knife in unskilled hands is still dangerous. Both traditions understand that skill is earned slowly and never finished.
Japan formalises this in shuhari (守破離). First you obey the form (shu). Then you begin to break from it (ha). Finally you leave it, because the form now lives inside you (ri). Sushi apprentices famously spend years on rice before they are trusted with fish. Swordsmiths and knife makers train for a decade or more.
Islam frames skill as amanah, a trust. Your abilities are not entirely your own. They are given to you, and you will be asked how you used them. Itqan is not perfectionism for its own sake; it is faithfulness to that trust. The Muslim butcher who learns to cut cleanly, quickly and mercifully is not only a good tradesman. He is fulfilling a religious duty.
In both cases, skill is moral. Doing a job badly is not just inefficient. It is a small betrayal of someone: the customer, the community, the animal, or God.
The output: what attention to detail produces
When intention, tool, method and skill come together, the output speaks for itself.
In the halal tradition, a properly performed slaughter produces meat that is clean, drained of blood, and obtained with minimal suffering. The quality of the product is inseparable from the ethics of the process. Meat is not halal simply because of its source; it becomes halal through how it was handled.
In Japan, a fish killed by ikejime and cut with a freshly sharpened yanagiba keeps its texture and flavour for days. The cut surface is so clean that the cells are not crushed, so the flesh does not weep. A diner may never know why the sashimi tastes better. But it does.
This is what Taguchi taught me to call the loss to society. A product that merely meets the specification still carries hidden costs if it drifts from the ideal. The closer we come to the target, the smaller the loss to everyone downstream. Ihsan and kodawari both aim at the target, not merely at the tolerance limit. They refuse to settle for “good enough”.
Where the two roads part
The similarities are striking, but the two are not the same. The difference lies mainly in why one strives.
| Ihsan (Islam) | Kodawari / Shokunin (Japan) | |
|---|---|---|
| Ultimate reference | God, who always sees | The craft, the customer, the community |
| Motivation | Worship and accountability in the Hereafter | Pride, duty, respect for materials and people |
| Scope | “In all things”, including private acts | Strongest in one’s chosen craft or role |
| Limit | Balance: no soul is burdened beyond its capacity | Can tip into exhausting perfectionism |
| Key image | The sharpened blade before slaughter | The whetstone before service |
That last row matters. Japanese perfectionism has a shadow side: overwork, burnout, and the fear of a single mistake. Islam pairs ihsan with moderation. Excellence is required, but so is mercy, including mercy to oneself. The Qur’an reminds us that Allah does not burden a soul beyond what it can bear.
Conversely, Muslim societies can learn much from Japan’s discipline of execution. We often preach ihsan beautifully and practise it poorly. Japan practises something very close to ihsan daily, often without any theology attached. The gap between our ideal and our output is itself a quality problem worth solving.
Sharpen the blade first
What would change if we treated every task like the sharpening of a knife?
The lecturer would prepare the lecture as if every student mattered. The civil servant would process the file as if it were his own family’s. The engineer would aim at the target, not the tolerance limit. And the student would master the basics before reaching for the advanced.
Living in Tokyo, I see kodawari every day: in the train that arrives to the second, in the bento arranged like a garden. As a Muslim, I see in it a reflection of something my own tradition taught long ago. Japan reminds me what ihsan looks like in practice. Islam reminds me why it matters.
The lesson of the sharpened blade is simple. Quality is not what we check at the end. It is how we prepare, how we act, and whom we believe is watching.
References
- Sahih Muslim, Book of Hunting and Slaughter, hadith of Shaddad ibn Aws (no. 1955)
- Sahih Muslim, Book of Faith, Hadith of Jibril (no. 8)
- Hadith on itqan: al-Bayhaqi, Shu’ab al-Iman; al-Tabarani, al-Mu’jam al-Awsat
- Qur’an, al-Baqarah 2:286
Leave a comment