Friday Sermon by: Alban Fejza, Online Congregation Director

Summary:

In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza explains that tattoos, plastic surgery and other cosmetic body modifications are essentially lies about one’s genes, that people who have them may join the submitters, and that once they have a child, they owe the community half the cost of the procedure as penalty Zakat.

Video Transcript:

Praise be to God. There is no other god except God.

According to verse 6:120, whoever commits a sin will have to pay for it, and to spare us from paying for those sins in Hell, God prescribes for us in the Quran the penalties, or payments, for those sins, to be executed here on Earth. For example, the penalty, or payment, for theft is returning the stolen item and marking the hand of the thief. The payment for adultery is a hundred lashes, and so on. But when it comes to the sin of lying, on the surface it seems that the Quran prescribes no payment or penalty. Actually, the payment for lying, according to the Quran, is that the person should not be trusted again, if the lie is big or if he lied often. If the lie is small, or the person does not lie as often, the penalty is that you trust that person less in the future. You trust them partially, but also with a dose of caution. So this is the payment for lies for which no direct negative consequences can be proven.

However, there are lies for which direct consequences can be proven. So we have two types of lies. By the way, all lies ultimately have negative consequences; no doubt about it. However, for some lies, the number of victims is so low that the amount by which each victim is hurt is large, which makes it worthwhile for those victims to pursue justice and prove how the lie hurt them. But there are lies where the number of victims is so large that the amount by which each victim is hurt is really low, to the point where it’s not worth it for any of those victims to pursue justice when they get hurt by it.

Let me give you an example of each of these two types of lies. First example: let’s say that you buy a used car from someone, and they tell you that it has four-wheel drive. You pay for the car thinking that it has four-wheel drive, and in the winter you realize that it doesn’t. In this case, even though the Quran does not prescribe a financial punishment for the lie, it prescribes a financial punishment for the harm which the lie caused, and because the harm is large for a single person, it is worthwhile for that person to seek compensation for it.

Now here is an example of the other type of lie. Let’s say that someone says that there are aliens on the dark side of the moon, the side which can never be seen from Earth, but the governments are hiding this fact from us. Even though this type of lie does as much harm as the lie about the four-wheel drive, the harm is spread in many smaller portions over a large number of people, so each of the victims is harmed much less. In this case, some youngsters and inexperienced people might believe the lie and trust science less, and as a result they might be less likely to make evidence-based decisions in their lives. But none of them could go and seek compensation from the liar about aliens on the other side of the moon, because the harm is so small for each victim that none of them individually thinks it’s worth seeking compensation. So for this type of lie, the punishment is that you just don’t trust that person again.

We have to keep in mind everything we have said so far about lies in order to decide how to approach the issue of cosmetic body modifications. But first, let’s see what the Hadith followers claim about cosmetic body modifications. One type of such modification is tattoos. According to Hadith 5,931 of Bukhari, Abdullah said that he heard God’s messenger say that God has cursed the woman who does tattoos and the one who has them done.

First of all, we have no definitive evidence that this statement was ever said by Muhammad, but for the purposes of this analysis, let’s assume that he really did say it. Well, by the same logic, we can find many other hadiths where Muhammad said that liars are cursed, and given that there’s no person speaking today who has not lied at least once in their lifetime, then, according to Hadith, everyone is cursed. These kinds of blanket statements, which do not mention sufficient nuances and details, do not help at all in resolving issues. So even if the Hadith about tattooed people being cursed is true, it does not help at all to tell us how to approach the issue of tattoos, except that it divides the Muslims into congregations which will accept tattooed people and congregations which will not. So what this Hadith, and all the people who use it, end up doing is simply using a peripheral issue to divide the Muslims.

But then, what is the answer to this question? Should we allow people with tattoos, plastic surgery and other cosmetic body modifications in our congregation, or not? As with all the other peripheral religious issues, the answer is very nuanced. We should take the whole Quran into consideration to reach the right conclusion about this issue. First of all, of course, there’s something wrong with tattoos and other cosmetic body modifications, because they all go against how God designed us. God tells us not to change God’s creation, in verse 4:119, and in verse 2:84, God tells us not to shed blood, and during tattoos, plastic surgeries and so on, unnecessary blood is shed and the body is modified.

However, these two verses cannot be used as definitive proof that tattoos and plastic surgery are prohibited, because ear piercing and circumcision both involve shedding blood and modifying the body, yet the Bible and the Quran do not prohibit ear piercing for girls, or circumcision for the descendants of Abraham. So then what is the difference between earrings for girls and circumcision for the male descendants of Abraham on one side, and tattoos and other cosmetic body modifications on the other? Well, the essential difference is that one of them is essentially not a lie, while the other essentially is a lie.

When a girl has earrings in her pierced ears, she is essentially claiming, according to the Bible, “I am a female who depends on society to survive,” and this is essentially true. And when a boy who is a descendant of Abraham, which includes almost all Middle Eastern-looking males, gets circumcised, according to the Bible he’s essentially claiming that he is a descendant of Abraham, which again is essentially true for all the people of the Middle East and people who look similar to them. On the other hand, when a person gets a tattoo or a cosmetic body modification, he is essentially saying, “Look how good my genes are.” Even though the change in the body is not a lie, because the body really did change, the genes are still the same. So the lie is about the genes.

So now we have gotten to the essence of the issue of tattoos, plastic surgery and other cosmetic body modifications. They are essentially lies about your genes, and this finally allows us to understand how to approach them, if we think of them as essentially lies. So if we want to know whether people with tattoos and other cosmetic body modifications should be allowed in our congregation, we should ask the same question about people who have told lies before. And because all of us have lied at least once in our lifetime, and we are already in the congregation of submitters, this means that tattooed people, and people with other cosmetic body modifications, should be allowed to join and stay in our congregation.

However, at the beginning of this sermon, we said that there are lies for which compensation for the harm caused can be pursued in practice, and lies for which it cannot. For example, if a person has lied that his car has four-wheel drive when it does not, then as long as he keeps the car to himself, it’s almost impossible to measure the harm caused by his lie. But if that person sells the car after lying about the four-wheel drive, then the harm from the lie becomes measurable. Basically, the damage caused is equal to the difference in price between a car with four-wheel drive and the same car without it, plus any damages from the lie. The same idea applies to cosmetic body modifications. As long as the person keeps his genes to himself, the cosmetic body modifications are not doing any practically measurable harm to anyone. But once that person has children, he has put his genes out there under the false pretense, created by the cosmetic body modification, that the genes are different from what they really are. So only after a submitter with cosmetic body modifications has children are we, as humans, actually able to measure the harm done by the genetic lie.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say that a girl was born with wide ears, which is perfectly normal, but she felt the social pressure to undergo cosmetic plastic surgery on her ears, and eventually she fell victim to the pressure and did it. Now she wants to join us, the submitters. She is perfectly allowed to join us, just like anyone else, and she does not have to pay for her sin, because, first of all, she paid for a large portion of her sin by paying the doctor, and also through the pain which she felt during the procedure, and also perhaps through medical complications and undesired results, or she might have compensated for it with many other good deeds. However, in almost all cases there is some part of the sin for which she has not paid yet, but that part of the sin is immeasurable for us as humans, and therefore we are not allowed to demand that she pay for it before she joins, because we don’t even know how much it is, and we as humans don’t even know whether there is anything left of her sin to pay for by now.

However, if she has children while being a submitter with cosmetic body modifications, then she has released her genes into the public, and at this moment her lie becomes a lie for which the harm can be measured, and this enables us to demand compensation for the harm. Here is how to roughly calculate, or estimate, the harm. Let’s say that she has a child. The child will carry half of the genes from her and half from the father, and therefore she has lied about half of the genes which she has put into the world. This means that she has to correct for that by paying half of the cost of the surgery. So let’s say that her cosmetic ear surgery cost $6,000. Now she owes the community of submitters half of it, so she has to pay $3,000 for giving birth to a child after the ear surgery.

This now becomes obligatory to be paid to the community of submitters, according to verses 9:102 and 9:103, and because it is obligatory, it has now become part of the penalty Zakat, under point 17 of the penalty Zakat, which is explained in the video titled “Penalty Zakat.” And since it now enters the system of Zakat, the rules of Zakat apply to it as well, which means that the payment should be made within one year after the birth of the child, and if it is not made, she will be excluded from the community of submitters and will not be considered a submitter anymore. But if she does pay it, then she is purified from that sin, and her sin is forgiven, and this in turn gives additional protection to her child, and God will bless her and her child. And then, if she gives birth to another child, she should pay again half of what it cost her to undergo any cosmetic body modification, and so on, every time she has a child.

When I say cosmetic body modifications, I mean any type of modification, like liposuction, nose surgery, breast enlargement or reduction, tummy tucks, eye reshaping, ear surgery, tattoos, permanent makeup, Botox injections, hair implants, and so on. All these are lies about your genes, for which you should pay only if you have a child after having them done. If you don’t have a child after having them done, then it’s between you and God. But if you have a child after having them done, then you have harmed the community of submitters by half the cost of the procedure, and you should compensate the community of submitters for it.

So if you have ever undergone any cosmetic body modification and you then have a child, soon after you have the child, calculate half the cost of any cosmetic body modifications which you underwent, and then send an email to your congregation director and tell him that you owe that specific amount of money to the community of submitters. You do not need to tell him any details, only the amount of the debt which you owe. He then writes it down as a debt which you owe, and you have to pay it within one year if he requests it. But if he delays it for more than one year and does not ask for it, because he does not have a specific project planned to spend it in the cause of God, then you should wait until he requests that you pay the debt, but you should have it saved and ready. Once he requests it, you should pay it, and he is responsible for spending it in the cause of God, according to the rules which I mentioned about public penalty Zakat in the video clarification titled “Penalty Zakat.”