The Honest Sale of a Green Car

There is the account, from the 1980s, of a man who owned a beautiful green car and needed to sell it before moving elsewhere. A buyer came, drawn by its colour, and the two agreed a price of a thousand dollars. Before the sale was concluded the seller stopped him: the right-hand door did not work, he said; there was a crack on the side; there was something else besides — and he went on naming every fault the car had. The buyer, astonished, asked whether he was trying to sell the car or talk him out of it, since usually a person points out a car's faults only to bring the price down when he himself is the one buying — was he buying the car, or selling it? The seller explained that he was selling it, that he was a Muslim, and that he had to tell the buyer the car's defects: he had not offered it "as is," and had he done so the matter would have been different, but since the buyer was purchasing it from him in the ordinary way, he could not come back afterwards complaining that the carburettor did not work, or anything else — his religion forbade him from hiding it. The buyer was so impressed that he gave an extra fifty dollars on top of the agreed price — a thousand and fifty dollars in all — saying he had never met a seller like this before; they shook hands on it. That extra sum was not rushwah, since the two were still negotiating and nothing had yet been settled between them: a Muslim selling anything must tell the prospective buyer its defects, or the money earned from the sale is ḥarām.