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Riba (a curse)
Date Sunday, October 27 @ 12:07:46
Topic Debtors Anonymous

Dear Sir,

I am sending you my personal experience with Riba problem. You can edit and can publish for information of others but without mentioning my name, please.

What happened to me is a lesson to others.

I am a lower middle class Muslim man residing in a Muslim state. I have no my own house nor I have any business or any other source of income except my monthly fixed salary. My family consists on my wife, a daughter and 3-son (1-infant and 2-school going). My daughter is in 7-grade school whereas 2-sons are in grade 5 and 1. I am living in a rented house. I am working with a private firm in administration. Prior to joining the private service, I was office assistant in a government department from where I was compulsory retired on medical grounds. As I am a chronic psoriasis patient with 95% body patched with psoriasis, regularly and continuously itching, irritating, burning and bleeding. This is not curable. Only preventive medication is possible which is too much costly & expensive. I have to look after my family being single source of earning.

For treatment and for the education of my children I used credit cards with all limits to overcome my financial debt. After that, I un-heartedly got a personal loan from a local bank which was on a very high interest rate (riba rate). From that very first day my problem starts. I can say my mistake started giving me the reward in shape of increasing my financial liabilities. In the first month I felt ease but real problem started from the second month when I started paying back the installments. When I took payable money from my salary (which was already low), there left hardly money for 1-week leaving nothing for house-rent, school fee and utility bills.

Resultantly, I started borrowing from relatives and friends and increased another liability. But there was nothing else to me to run the kitchen. During this period my children some time could not took lunch and some nights slept without dinner.

I think this is all due to my mistakes and ignorance from Quran and Islamic teachings. I am a white collar man could not tell real problems to my relatives and friends. I tried to get interest Free Loan (original Loan returnable on availability) but could not succeed. Now I am living in a very worst life having number of financial liabilities which is about 4000 US Dollars. This is all due to Riba and my wrong planning but there is cry to over split milk.

However, I have decided not to go for Riba business in future what so ever reasons thereof. I would like to ask and advise my fellow brothers and sisters not to go for Interest based (Riba) business especially the bank loans because it is a curse. You can never be out of it like me. You will lose your all comforts and will live in stress all the time.

You will not only face problems in this world but after-world on the Day of Judgment.

At the end I would like to request you and my fellow brothers and sisters to kindly help me out with some financial assistance out of your pious earnings so I can come out of my financial crises and able to smoothly educate my daughter and 3-son and payback all my debts.

Those who wish to help me out, can contact to me through IslamBank.Com or directly mail me (e-mail: mr10458@hotmail.com) for more details and verifications.

With regards

Sincerely,

[Name Withheld at The Request of IslamBank.Community Member.]

I found it difficult to even attempt editing this Muslim Man’s detailed description of the living Hell his family experiencing. Beyond the italics and boldface text formatting, the story is posted as it was submitted.

If you wish to communicate with the brother whose story this is, please email him directly at his email listed at the end of the story or simply post a comment to this story.

So worry about that first, and insha’Allah riba becomes easy to take care of once that base is established.

Bartering is allowed with some restrictions. It depends. Again, as I mentioned, you really need to take an Islamic Finance class if you want to understand.

The case here of dates-for-dates is the same species, same category of items being traded; the two conditions in this transaction is that it’s done hand to hand (in one sitting), and same quantity for same quantity.

This is not the same as trading dates for watermelons, or trading cash for dates. Those transactions have different requirements and conditions on them in order to avoid riba.

If you’re interested, drop me an email at ilmfruits@ilmfruits.com and we can follow up on this discussion in excruiciating detail.

(P.S. the proof for the above is the hadith: gold for gold, silver for silver, dates for dates, …)

But you are saying the opposite.

So battering is allowed as long as the traded items are different?

However, to be precise: pretty much all of interest is ribaa, and ribaa contains things other than interest–like trading 2kg of low-quality dates for 1kg of high-quality dates. For more details, take a class on Islamic finance.

Some of the scholars have mentioned that one of the wisdoms is with respect to monopolies–a person who only ever exchanges dates for dates, eventually forms a monopoly of high-quality dates; forcing him to deal with money breaks that, utterly and completely, from happening.