Friday Sermon by: Alban Fejza, Online Congregation Director

Summary:

In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza explains why believers must not be involved in alcohol or drug businesses, and how those with mixed deeds can atone through an additional penalty Zakat.

Video Transcript:

Praise be to God! There is no other god except God. As we know, drinking alcohol and taking recreational drugs are prohibited for the believers, according to verse 5:90 in the Quran. However, does this prohibition also include serving them to others, or buying them, or selling them, or producing them, or owning an alcohol related business, or carrying them or transporting them, or profiting from them, basically being involved in any way in alcohol or recreational drug related business. Is that prohibited? Well, yes, but with an exception. First, let me tell you why that is prohibited for the believers, and then I will tell you the exception to it. So, first why is getting involved in any way in alcohol related business or work, or recreational drugs related business or work prohibited. Doesn’t the Quran only prohibit taking them? Well, yes the Quran does declare them to be bad deeds if you drink them or take them, but at the same time, in verse, 4:85, the Quran says, “Whoever mediates a bad deed is also responsible for a portion of that deed.” So, when someone drinks alcohol, that is a bad deed, and if you serve it to him, or sell it to him, or produce it for him, or buy it for him, and so on, then you are mediating it, and therefore you are responsible for a portion of the sin of the person who is drinking it, and this makes it prohibited for you as well to get involved in alcohol or recreational drug related work or business, even if you don’t drink it yourself. However, most of the business today is mixed business. For example, no one works today simply as an alcohol server. People work as waiters for example in restaurants or coffee shops, and a portion of what they serve could be alcoholic drinks, and the other portion would be non-alcoholic things. So, this means that part of their job is allowed and the other part is not allowed, but you can not separate their job, it comes like that as a total offer by the business owner for example. You either agree to be a waiter or not. So, what should you do in that case? Well, the Quran provides a solution for it – for cases where we deal with mixed business, where a portion of it is allowed and a portion of it is prohibited. And in such cases, the Quran provides us with a way out of that sin through charity. Here is what verses 9:102 and 9:103 say about this. They say, “There are those who have confessed their sins; they have mixed good deeds with bad deeds.

God will redeem them, for God is Forgiver, Most Merciful. Take from their money a charity to purify them and sanctify them. And encourage them, for your encouragement reassures them. God is Hearer, Omniscient.” And I do list this type of charity under point 17 as a subcomponent of Penalty Zakat in the video clarification titled “Penalty Zakat”, but to keep that video reasonably short, I do not give the details there. But in this video, let me give you the details of the exact process of atonement or payment for mixed deeds, deeds which are both righteous and sinful at the same time. So, let’ say that you work as a flight attendant. In your job as a flight attendant, you spend about 40% of your efforts dealing with passenger safety and comfort, about 30% of your efforts preparing and serving food and the other 30% preparing and serving drinks. Now, in that 30% where you prepare and serve drinks, let’ say that 3% is preparing and serving alcoholic drinks. So, 3% of your job is prohibited, while the other 97% is allowed. And because this is a mixed deed (both good and bad) you probably do not want to throw away the 97% of the benefit just because 3% of it is prohibited.

As the saying goes, you might not want to throw away the baby together with the bath water. So, in that case, God obliges the congregation director to take a charity from you to purify you from your sin, from that 3% portion of your job. But, how much charity should be taken away from you to be given in the cause of God in order to purify exactly that 3%. And by the way, this is an obligation, not optional. The verse says ‘Take from their money a charity to purify the sinful portion of their mixed deed’. So it’s an order for the congregation director. It says, “take it”, and of course in verse 9:60, it tells us exactly where that charity should go after it has been taken. However, how much should the congregation director take to purify that 3% of dirty money of that specific flight attendant? Well, let’s imagine that actually you work in a job where 100% of your job is related to alcohol. Let’s say that you work in a liquor store in New York, for example, where all they might sell is alcohol and nothing else. In that case, you are just an employee there, but still 100% of your job would be related to alcohol. So, in that case in within your job you would be acting 100% like a so-called Christian who does not believe that alcohol is prohibited. And according to the Quran, even so-called Christians can go to heaven, if they give 10% Zakat to the submitters for charity. And this is because, God rewards every good deed 10 times, and if a so-called Christian earned his money 100% as an alcohol salesperson and gave 10% of it to the submitters for charity, then God would reward that 10 times, making it 100% which would wipe away all his sin as an alcohol salesman. So, the maximum that a person has to pay Zakat is 10%, if he earns all his money from business which is related to prohibited deeds, and the minimum is 2.5% if he completely earns his money in a pure form without incorporating any bad deeds into the good deeds. So, for example, a cashier in a store where no alcohol or pork, or gambling products are sold has to pay 2.5% Zakat, while a cashier in a store where all products are alcohol products has to pay 10% Zakat. Now, given that we require everyone to pay 2.5% at the beginning to join the submitters, that means that the cashier of the store where all products are alcohol he has to pay an additional 7.5% Zakat, additional zakat to stay with the submitters to reach the 10%. So, the additional Zakat which a person has to pay on top of the 2.5% should be anywhere between 0% and 7.5%. And this is one of the many reasons why the Quran does not directly mention 2.5% as the definitive absolute value of Zakat for all circumstances. It’s because it depends on circumstances. If you are an absolutely perfect submitter with no mixed deeds, it would be 2.5%, but it can be higher than that if you earned your money through mixed deeds. So, I calculated the values of Additional Zakat between 0 and 7.5% for each mixed deed, depending on what proportion of it is sinful, and you can see them in this table. So, in this table for example, you can see that if 20% of your business is related to the sale, or service or producing of things which are prohibited in the Quran, then the additional Zakat which you have to pay is 1.5%. This is on top of the regular 2.5%. And by the way, unlike the regular 2.5% Zakat which is calculated from excess wealth, this Zakat is directly calculated from net income or net profits. Yes, we know that the Quran does say that we should give Zakat from the excess wealth.

That’s true. However, all the money obtained through dirty methods is already excess money at the moment you get it, because God would not put you in a situation where you have to do dirty business in order to survive, unless you put yourself in it, which means that it was a choice, not a need, and therefore it automatically counts as excess wealth, and not as necessary wealth. Another difference between the additional Zakat and the regular 2.5% Zakat is that this Zakat definitely must be collected and then distributed. The congregation director can allow the submitters in the congregation to give their 2.5% regular Zakat directly to the final recipients in need because the submitters who do that can be trusted to do that. However, once we talk about the additional Zakat, that automatically implies that some of us as submitters were willing to bend the rules a little bit when it comes to how we deal with money, and this means that we have no guarantee that that same person would not also bend the rules when it comes to distributing the Zakat to the final recipient. So, in this case, you are obliged to give the additional zakat to the congregation director only who should be more trustworthy than you to redistribute it transparently to the final recipients which are mentioned in verse 9:60.

And because the collection of the additional zakat is mandatory before its distribution, that is why God says in verse 9:103, “take from their money”, while when it comes to the regular zakat, it leaves it up to the congregation director to collect it and distribute it or authorize the direct distribution to the final recipients by the submitters themselves.. So, now let me take a few examples of how this table can be used. Let’s say that you own a breakfast restaurant in United States, where a lot of people prefer to have their eggs with bacon, which comes from pigs. Now, let’s say that about 8% of the food which you sell in that restaurant is bacon. So, you look at this table, and you see that for 8%, you have to pay 0.60% additional Zakat. Now, let’s say that your annual net profits from that restaurant were 100,000 dollars, you multiply it by 0.60%, and it gives you 600 dollars. So, you must give 600 dollars to your congregation director as additional zakat to purify your dirty business practices of the last year. Now, let’ take another example. Let’s say that you work as a cleaner or IT, in a casino. These days, for example, for most of the casinos, gambling and intoxicants would probably be only about 60% of their business.

Most casinos these days are also hotels, and sometimes they sell other non-gambling and non-intoxicating products and services. So, let’s assume that you work as a cleaner or IT in a casino where 60% of its business is gambling and intoxicants. So, we check this table, and we see that 60% corresponds to 4.5% of additional zakat. So, let’s say that your annual net income last year from that job was 40,000 dollars. So, 4.5% of 40,000 dollars is 1,800 dollars. So you have to give 1,800 dollars to your congregation director as additional zakat to atone for the fact that you work in that casino. Or let’s take another example, let’s say that you are a male who works as a taxi driver where someone else does not monitor you with cameras or a microphone. Let’s say that during your job, 20% of the time, your passengers are females who are alone. Let’ say that you work 20% during the night, which means that 4% of all the passengers which you transport are females who are alone at night, and I would assume that being in a car is half private and half public. So we reduce that 4% down to 2%. So, 2% of the time while working as a taxi driver, you are very likely staying alone with females in privacy, and this is prohibited in the Quran according to verse 2:235 and a few other verses. So, we check this table, we look at the 2%, and the corresponding additional zakat for it is 0.15%. So, if that taxi driver earned 50,000 dollars net profit during last year, we multiply it by 0.15% and we get 75 dollars. So that taxi driver has to give 75 dollars to his congregation director as additional zakat. And by the way, usually these dirty business practices in today’s world are connected with alcohol, or pork products, or recreational drugs (if they are legal in that country), or some form of games of chance, or staying with the opposite gender alone in private spaces where other’s don’t have easy access. And someone, might say, aren’t you technically allowing those things by enabling the purification from them through payment through additional zakat. Well, I am not the first to say this. Listen to this: “God has prescribed for us laws to govern the important aspects of our lives, and He left a lot of freedom for many other aspects in our lives. And we are told that these laws are recommendations or commandments. They are commandments because we should do them, and they are recommendations because we have the freedom not to do them, as long as we are ready to pay the price.” So, as you can see, in this video, Rashad Khalifa said that we can understand the Quranic rules as recommendations as long as we are ready to pay the price, and the amount of that price is what I discussed in this video. And if you refuse to pay this price, there is a bigger price – Hell. Obviously, this method of atonement or payment is only for mixed sins, and not for direct sins. For example, you can not commit adultery and expect to pay for it through this method of additional zakat. Here we are talking only about mixed deeds, or being some kind of mediator for adultery. For example, working at the front desk of a hotel, where about 5% of the people who come there, you have good reason to believe that they came there to commit adultery in the rooms which they book, and you have to give them the key to their room, because they paid for their hotel room, or you can quit your job. Now, giving them the key is that mixed sin, you are acting as a mediator or a supporter for sin, and for that you earn a portion of that sin according to verse 4:85, and that is why you have to pay additional zakat to purify that portion.

But you can not use this method for the bigger or direct sins, like killing, adultery, mistreating parents, stealing, violence, gambling, drinking alcohol, eating pork, taking drugs, cheating during trade. For these sins, you end up paying more, and differently. But, here I am talking only about being a mediator for those sins while having a job or doing legal business for beneficial things, and that makes the total of that job or that business, a mixed deed – partly sinful and partly good. And sometimes, it is not easy to calculate how big of a portion is the sinful portion, but just try to do your best to separate your activities into smaller calculable portions, and then calculate them, and wherever you are not sure just try to roughly estimate. That’s good enough.