Section Three
Rent and Payment
of Reward
Al-Ijāreh and Al-Jo‘āleh
Introduction on allowed and forbidden work
Human effort spreads over a lot of jobs in which a person seeks to earn a living and make profit from them and the Shari’ah has dealt with them, making allowed most of them and prohibited a small number of them. As for the allowed, we do not want to discuss these; as for the forbidden, however, as they are not allowed to be done by man for himself and his personal benefit, and it is also not allowed to do them for the interest and benefit of others whether paid or free of charge.
And since it is difficult to arrange the allowed forms of work in a specified number because they spread over a very wide area (of human effort), we shall limit our discussion here to some prohibited jobs that are generally an area of common test, according to the following categories:
First: Religious acts and work
844. Religious acts may be divided into two parts:
1- Obligatory and recommended acts which the Shari’ah wanted the person to perform free of charge, such as the daily prayers and obligatory fasting, the newāfil (additional recommended prayers) and the call to prayer, and the like; in all this it is forbidden to ask a fee for them.
2- Obligatory and recommended acts that are not known in the Shari’ah to be done free of charge, such as washing and burying the dead, teaching Islamic jurisprudence and other religious knowledge, performing prayers and fasting as qada’ for the dead, cleaning the mosque and building in it, reciting the Qur’an or commemuration (such as Huseini) functions or the like, here a charge may be taken for doing these.
Second: Aiding the oppressors/unjust and working for them
845. Oppression/injustice is transgressing on the rights of others, inflicting aggression and harm on them, their possessions, honour, religion, homeland or any other things that are related to them, regardless of the party from which such oppression is initiated. Just as injustice is forbidden to be done by the person, it is forbidden to aid oppressors, whether against Muslims or non-Muslims, free of charge or paid, even if by merely remaining by their side, which strengthens them to do injustice.
846. Muslims are not allowed to join any job – inside the state or outside it –which involves un-Islamic rulings in the judicial system, or to execute the judicial rulings of detention, imprisonment or punishment, or to be, through it, a spy for the oppressor, or to legislate laws that are contradictory to Islamic jurisprudence; also any money taken from such jobs is forbidden.
Third: Sculpture and painting
847. It is forbidden, as an obligatory precaution, to make a three-dimensional sculpture of humans and animals that have souls, if it is complete; being complete depends on the state of the work, so if one makes a sculpture of a person putting his hand in his pocket or sitting, this is considered complete although some of its parts are concealed.
848. It is not forbidden to make a sculpture of plants or inanimate/non-living things that have no soul. It is also not forbidden absolutely to make paintings, of things that have soul or others, complete or otherwise.
Fourth: Singing and music
849. The criterion for allowable and forbidden singing is the meaning of the words being sung, so if the meaning is true in the general understanding, even if it is about food or natural scenes, and elevating in value so that it is singing about the Divine/God, in this case singing is allowed. But if its meaning is false, which is what relates to the sexual instinct in humans, even if on the level of the normal description of the beauty of the lover, or if it is praising oppressors or blaspheming the sacred or the like, in these cases singing is prohibited and it (the prohibition) is stronger in the last two cases because it contains two sins: the sin of praising or blasphemy and the sin of singing. When singing is forbidden, fees for it are also forbidden.
850. The music that is forbidden is one in which the tune/melody negatively affects the spiritual immunity of the person through an intensity of pace that helps in instigating lusts and forbidden acts, or if the music destroys nerves etc.
851. There is no musical instrument that is forbidden in itself as long as it is suitable for allowed tunes/melodies; therefore, it is allowed to make, sell, buy and use them. That said, if it is assumed that a given instrument is used most of the time for forbidden kinds of music, in this case it is not allowed to make it, nor buy or sell it, although it is allowed to use it for allowable tunes/melodies.
852. It is allowed for a woman to sing love songs in the procession of carrying the bride home, on the condition that men are not present. However, it is not allowed that the husband and wife indulge in singing love songs or the like for each other even when alone.
Fifth: The food industry and restaurant jobs
1- Alcohol
853. It is forbidden to work in fields that are related to the direct manufacture of alcoholic drinks, which includes all stages of preparation of extraction and pressing, fermentation and bottle-filling, storage and transport to customers, or even working in the laboratories of the alcohol factories that supervise analysis and quality and the like, both in Muslim countries and outside them.
854. It is forbidden to serve alcohol in restaurants and the like, or to be involved in its transfer and storage in shops that sell it, or for cooks to put it in their recipes. The exception is the work of the cashier who takes payment for the alcohol if he is not the one actually doing the selling; excluded also are those who wash the glasses used for alcohol.
2- Dead animals and pork
855. It is allowed for Muslims to work in fields that are related to allowed uses of dead animals and pork, dead or alive, such as industries making fertilisers, candles etc.
Also, Muslim workers in restaurants of non-Muslims are allowed to serve and sell (the meat of) dead animals and pork to non-Muslims whose religion allows them these, although it is better to elevate oneself from this and avoid dealing with them as far as possible.
3- Pure jobs
856. It is allowed to work in the food industry related to pure insects, animals and things, even if it is not allowable to eat them, such as rabbits, frogs, and the like; it is also allowed to work in rearing, slaughtering, canning, storing, cooking and serving them to whoever eats them, unless it is regarded as encouraging them to eat them, in which case it becomes forbidden.
Sixth: Tools of gambling, leisure and lottery
857. It is allowed to play with any equipment used for leisure without gambling, whether this tool was manufactured for gambling or not. That said, it is appropriate to avoid playing with or using things that were manufactured for gambling, which applies also to backgammon and chess. As for playing with gambling tools with gambling, it is one of the forbidden acts and grand sins. Also, it is not allowed to play with leisure equipment with gambling as an obligatory precaution.
858. The lottery invented in our time is not regarded as gambling and buying lottery tickets is not forbidden, regardless of the organisation operating it and the goal it was initiated for; the money which the person wins from it is allowed like any other allowed money.
859. One must abstain from indulging in playing with leisure games if it reaches the extent of failing to do one's obligations; in fact one must avoid even what amounts to less than this if it leads to the disruption of familial and social relationships and abandoning good matters.
Seventh: The medical profession
860. The doctor’s work is within the framework of prevention of harm and stopping harm in the ill; this is why it is – in general – allowed to do anything that is needed to treat a patient and stop harm to him, within the levels of harm that reasonable people strive to stop from befalling them before it reaches levels that lead to destruction and death; so it is allowed for the doctor to carry out all that the treatment requires even if the act is forbidden outside medical treatment, such as wounding, amputation and the like, and touching and looking at the body of the opposite sex.
861. It is allowed for students of medicine to choose any speciality in the fields of medicine, although some of them are less problematic than others; so it is allowed to specialise in gynaecology (women's diseases), dermatology (skin diseases) or the like which require touching or seeing the ‘awrah (the genitals and anus), as long as all medical fields are important and the learning of these is essential to stop harm.
862. It is not allowed for the doctor to carry out abortion for a woman and kill her embryo whether it was begotten by a Muslim or non-Muslim, except in two cases:
1- If keeping the embryo causes the mother’s death or intense harm that is similar to death, or for fear of honour killing; here it is allowed to do the abortion regardless of its age.
2- If keeping it is so intensely difficult that it cannot be undertaken, but here only in the stage before the spirit moves into the embryo.