Cards, Horses, Dogs, and the Man Ruined by Qimār

Most children today play cards, and playing cards is likewise ḥarām if money is wagered on it — if the loser of a round has to buy the winner a kebab, with a drink, six hundred millilitres of Coke, that is ḥarām. Even where Muslims sit together with a deck of cards and exchange no money, no betting, they are still handling the tools of qimār, and this instils in the mind, in the hearts of the younger children in particular, that it is acceptable to play with those tools — so that later, without proper Islamic education, playing for ten cents, twenty cents, a dollar, five dollars, twenty dollars, for a car, for a house, no longer seems out of reach.

Qimār is such a disease among Muslims today, running from horses to dogs. There is the account of families under counsel where a man of sixty-five, secretly addicted to qimār, would take the money earned from his work and spend the whole of it in a single night, coming home to invent excuses for his family, which was left in ruins — unable to pay the fees for the children's schooling, sometimes unable even to buy milk. The family did not know what to do. Not even his own children knew. This same man had performed Hajj and prayed five times a day, and never missed Ramaḍān, yet carried this disease beneath it all. Others go to the greyhounds — exactly the same thing — or place bets on children's go-kart races on a small track; wherever there is a bet on the outcome, it remains qimār. There is no such thing as a friendly bet: a bet is a bet is a bet. It is not the size of the stake — even two dollars — that matters, but the act of defiance against Allah (swt) that the bet itself constitutes.