Ruling on working as an accountant in a company calculating the amount of riba, and he may not be able to find any other work
Question If an accountant who works in a company, dealing with its budgets etc., refuses to write down or record riba (interest), they will throw him out and jobs are hard to find. Can this in any way be regarded as being forced to do something, or does he have to leave that job? Praise…
Question
a company, dealing with its budgets etc., refuses to write down or record riba (interest),
they will throw him out and jobs are hard to find. Can this in any way be regarded as
being forced to do something, or does he have to leave that job?
Praise be to Allah.
We put this question to Shaykh Muhammad ibn
Saalih al-‘Uthaymeen, may Allaah preserve him, who replied as follows:
No, that is not a kind of being forced to do something.
Question:
You mean that the threat of being sacked is not a kind of
being forced?
Answer:
It is not a kind of being forced, because this is not the
only kind of work that Allaah created.
Question:
But from people’s experience, a man may look for work
for a year or two years, with debts piling up all the time, and never finding any work in
all that time. Could this be a reason for adopting a lenient attitude and allowing people
to take this kind of work?
Answer:
No, this is not an excuse, because if it were, we could say
that the poor man who needs money to build a house or get married would be allowed to deal
with riba (and this is not the case). And Allaah knows best.
