Q176 :The mosque in our locality is being rebuilt,
but much of the money is received as donations from rich people who
acquired their wealth through cheating the government and bribery. What
is the Islamic point of view in this matter? Can one stay away from
such a mosque and pray at home on grounds that it is built with money
earned through non-Islamic ways? Can donations from non-Muslims be used
in the construction of a mosque?
A176 : What worries me in your question is the
sweeping remark that rich people have acquired their wealth through
unlawful means. It is not beyond a highly God-fearing man who has a
good measure of business acumen to get rich through perfectly
legitimate means. While it is true that some people may not have any
scruples about cheating the government or bribing officials in order to
get some unlawful advantages, we cannot apply the same standards to
everybody in a sweeping statement which condemns everyone that gets
rich. Among the netpanions of the Prophet, there were people who
managed to benete very wealthy and none of them can be accused of
having used unlawful means. When the mosque is built in your locality,
to abstain from offering prayer in it is wrong. By doing so, you
deprive yourself of an opportunity to congregational prayers. You will
be abandoning a duty. Allah tells us to bow down in worship with others
who do likewise. That means that congregational prayer is a duty. The
fact that some of the money received for building the mosque may have
nete from a suspect source is no justification to abstain from
attending it. To start with, donations received from Christians and
other non-Muslims can be used in the construction of the mosques. That
is certainly permissible. Moreover, the netmittee collecting donations
is not required to verify the source of every donation made. What you
have to remember is that giving a donation is a separate transaction.
The money itself is not contaminated by the process it is earned.
Therefore, if I sell a certain item of merchandise to a person who
pays the price with money he had stolen or had received as bribery, my
earning is perfectly legitimate because I am not responsible to verify
his source of innete. The same applies to the fund-raising netmittee
for building the mosque. You may say that these people are known to
accept or take bribery or whatever, but Islam does not conduct its
dealings with individuals or netmunities on the basis of hearsay.
Our Dialogue ( Source : Arab News – Jeddah )