Two Cars and a Rigged Machine

Among the shiftiest businesses in Australia today is the buying of dead cars — smashed, written-off vehicles bought cheaply, resurrected with new panels, new paint, a new interior, until they look new again — and sold, to a buyer who knows nothing of the accident, as though new, though the car is only two months old and was written off by an insurance company after a crash. It is sold at auction, in a garage, on eBay or in the newspaper, without a word to the customer of what the car actually is, and every dollar earned this way is ḥarām, because of the trickery and the deception it involves.

There is the account of an Italian shopkeeper who paid four hundred and eighty thousand dollars to fit out a large shop, buying the machinery from a Muslim seller who promised him everything according to the specifications in the catalogue. What he actually received was different: the machine had been bought from China, its insides changed entirely, so that from the outside it looked exactly as promised while everything within it cost a hundred times less. From this one sale the seller made, by his own reckoning, four hundred and eighty thousand dollars, plus a further two hundred thousand besides — and had tricked a non-Muslim customer in doing so. The matter later came before a court, where the seller's dealings were given in evidence. The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) said: he who deceives a Muslim, or harms him, or plots against him, is not one of us — and if the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) says that a person doing this is not one of us, then what is left to say? Such a person is no Muslim at all.