Tasmiyyah On Fish
No matter what you eat you must pronounce God’s name be it meat, fish or veggies – at least before eating it – if not sure whether done or not at the time of slaughtering. Quran says something like anything upon which God’s has not been pronounced is not lawful to eat. Limiting the scope of this verse to meat from certain animals only does not make sense to me. Nor does the argument of ‘way of taking life’ make any sense.
But that’s assuming the only purpose was negative in nature eg to stop the slaughter in the names of false gods. Then the directives shouldn’t have existed and it should have just been reasoning as to why shirk is wrong etc. But positive commandments were given as to mentioning the name of God such as in 6:121. Anyway the reasoning is secondary to the commandments but I find no real issue in Ghamidi sahabs proposed reasoning. And I think it still does have to do with the method of killing because even if the pagans weren’t fishing which I doubt they never had fish they would have been farming and no directives were given for vegetables or fruits. This is why I wrote about land animals which is the same reasoning Ghamidi sahab applied for slaughter. EG my reasoning for the Quran only talking about the meat of land animals is parallel with the reasoning Ghamidi sahab uses for slaughter as the illah in my opinion