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Wa`alykum As-Salaam wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakaatuh.
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
Dear questioner, we would like to thank you for showing keenness on knowing the teachings of Islam, and we appreciate the great confidence you have in us. We hope our efforts meet your expectations.
With regard to your question, Dr. Monzer Kahf, Scholar in Islamic Economics & Financial Expert, states the following:
“This question relates to the issue of what transactions are permitted with people whose income comes from haram or mixed sources, and who use the commodity we sell them for conducting haram or mixed actions.
Although there are sayings that indicate the prohibition of the incomes gained through fortune-telling and prostitution there is no call or even a trace of evidence that they must not be sold food, cloth and other permissible commodities.
Would it be imaginable that the Shari'ah calls for prohibiting selling them foods and leaving them to starve? Any claim of prohibiting the construction of sale contracts with them is not consistent with the texts and objectives of Shari'ah and cannot be supported by any evidence from the Qur'an and the Sunnah.
Further, when we talk about components of a sale contract and the conditions of these components, there no need to make research about the source of the price paid by the purchaser or rent paid by lessee. It is true that if one happens to know that the price itself (termed 'ain) is known to be stolen, you must not accept it as a price. The reason is that a stolen thing remains a property of its owner not of the person who has it in his possession.
Let us come now to the use of sold commodity by its purchaser. There are talks about resentment or dislike (kaarahah), not prohibition, of selling grape to a person who is known for sure to use it for brewery. But An-Nawawi argues that it is permissible to sell a slave singer for a price that includes a premium for her singing (with the assumption that singing is haram). [Al Majmoo`, vol. 9]
Putting these together, one may conclude that even if we accept the view of kaarahah, it is conditioned by certain knowledge that it is going to be used for haram.
Applying these rules to the question in hand makes the following: the use of an ATM machine is to dispense cash, make deposits and provide information. It is not for making interest based contract. For instance, there is no argument for prohibiting a job of cashier or teller in a conventional bank even though cash dispensed may be a result of a Riba-based contract, but dispensing the cash by a teller is not haram. This makes it seem permissible to rent a space for an ATM from the point of view that it will be no more than a rented space.
As for the income of conventional banks, no one can claim that all of it comes from interest. In some conventional banks, especially in the third world, like India, interest-free sources of income make high percentage of net profit. The most that can be said here is that the income here is mixed. Further no one can tell for sure that a specific dollar given as rent came from Riba transaction, by this one cannot fall back on the argument of a stolen price.
Lastly, the price (rent in our case) is taken in exchange of a permissible thing (the usufruct of the space) in a permissible contract.
For further information, you may visit site: www.kahf.net
If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to write back!
May Allah guide you to the straight path, and guide you to that which pleases Him, Amen.
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