Fortune-Tellers, Filthy Earnings, and the Household's Table

Among the further ḥarām jobs that Islam shuns is divination, fortune-telling — reading a person's horoscope, taking a hand and describing what is to come: a young man here, a beautiful woman there, a good job on its way — for twenty dollars, the money put down first. Whatever is earned this way is absolutely ḥarām also; it is kasb min al-khabīthāt, earning from filth, and it is not allowed.

There is the account of one of Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq's (may Allah be pleased with him) own assistants and slaves, who once brought him beautiful fresh dates. He ate some, then asked where they had come from. The man explained that before Islam, in the days of the jāhiliyyah, he had told somebody's fortune and been promised these dates as payment for it. Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq (may Allah be pleased with him) put his own finger down his throat and brought everything back up.

Many Muslims today, when given something, do not even ask where it came from; parents and wives do not ask husbands and fathers where their earnings come from. In earlier generations, grandmothers would tell their husbands, as they left home to earn a living, to bring the bread home: we are too weak to bear the fire of Jahannam, they would say, but we can bear the pangs of hunger, so whatever you bring home, let it be ḥalāl, even if it is nothing but dry, mouldering, mouldy bread — we can never stand the fire of Jahannam. Nowadays, wives spoiled by their husbands want this and want that, more than a husband can meet, and the husband, unable to satisfy the demand, resorts instead to these ḥarām means of transacting. This too is ḥarām.

Najash is itself a form of cheating, a deception in sale: pretending to want to buy something with no intention of buying it, in order to raise its price and deceive the honest, deceived buyer looking on. This is seen constantly at auctions — a false bid called out, two hundred and fifty, two hundred and fifty, so that too many people appear to be bidding, when in fact those bidding never intend to buy at all. This is absolutely ḥarām, to do so.