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Fatwa CenterLawfulness of the rent of a house bought with bribe money
Question
A person built a house with bribe money. Is the rent of this house halal or haram? Please give hadiths and Quran and answer the question. Please explain your answer.
Answer
All perfect praise be to Allaah, The Lord of the Worlds. I testify that there is none worthy of worship except Allaah and that Muhammad, sallallaahu ʻalayhi wa sallam, is His slave and Messenger.
Bribery is prohibited in Islam, and it is unlawful for the Muslim to accept bribes. If the bribe-giver offers the bribe in order to claim a benefit permissible in its own right (or to claim his own rights), then the bribe-taker is obliged to return it to the bribe-giver as long as he is identifiable and can be reached (his whereabouts are known). However, if the bribe-giver is unidentifiable or unknown or if one cannot deliver the bribe back to him by any possible means after careful search and investigation, then the bribe-taker should spend it on charitable causes for purposes that fulfill the interests of the Muslims, such as offering it to the poor and needy, for instance.
However, if the bribe-giver offers the bribe to claim what is unlawful to him, then the bribe money should not be returned to him so that he would not acquire both the unlawful benefit and the compensation that he had paid for it. Nevertheless, it should be noted that it is also unlawful for the bribe-taker to keep the bribe in this case as well; instead, he should spend it in charity on the public interests of the Muslims or offer it to the poor and needy.
Ibn Al-Qayyim
wrote:
“If someone is offered an unlawful payment and he accepts that, such as a prostitute, a singer, a wine-seller, one who bears false witness etc, and then he repents and that payment is in his possession, then some scholars held that he should return it to the one who offered it, because it is his wealth and the receiver did not take it in a lawful manner, and the person who paid it did not get a lawful benefit in return. Others maintained that his repentance requires that he gives it in charity and should not give it back to the one who gave it to him. This is the view favored by Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah and it is the more correct of the two relevant views...” [Madaarij As-Saalikeen]
As for the real estate or items bought with the bribe money, it is not prohibited for the person to avail himself of them because the unlawfulness of such ill-gotten wealth is related to the person’s liability and not to the ill-gotten wealth itself or the items bought with it. Al-Mudawwanah reads, “If you give some dinars to someone to keep them for you and he bought a commodity with them, then you have no right to the commodity; rather, you are only entitled to claim your dinars ...”
Hence, it is lawful for the person mentioned in the question to avail himself of that house and its rent. For more benefit, please refer to fataawa 93774 and 102369.
Allaah knows best.
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