“Personal property cannot be made from plunder, robbery, usurpation, theft, bribes, deceit, interest, profiteering or ways which cause them. The state may add it to its treasury, wholely or partly, whenever it wants. Historical examples indicate that the state has been given this right entirely.”
He is wrong once again. It is true that such unjust earnings cannot be halâl. The state has to get them back, not whenever it wants but immediately. But what the state takes back cannot be its own. It should transfer them to their owners. The duty of the state is to get the oppressed person’s due from the cruel one. If the state, instead of giving them to the oppressed, adds them to its treasury, the state is cruel, too. In the section about giving salary to women from the Bayt al-mâl in the fifth volume of Radd al-muhtâr, Ibn Âbidîn wrote: “Property obtained in a harâm way, for example, that which is usurped, should be returned to its owner. Such property cannot be Bayt al-mâl’s. It cannot be common property for all Muslims, either.” Property expropriated illegally from the people, i.e. the usurped property, cannot be owned by the state. It should be returned to its owner or, if the owner is dead, to the inheritors. If the owner is unknown, it should be dispensed to the poor. It is harâm for those who know the owner to get or use it.
If a person, though he knows its owner, does not return the property harâm for him, and if he expects to be rewarded in the next world for using it in a charitable deed such as building a
mosque or giving alms, he becomes an unbeliever. And if others who know that the property was harâm for him say that he has earned thawâb, they also become unbelievers, for it is fard for him to give this property or, if it has been spoilt, its match or, if it does not have a match, its cost to its owner or to his inheritors, or, if he cannot find them, to dispense it to the poor with the intention that its thawâb be given to them. It is harâm to use it for something else. It is harâm for others also to buy (or accept as a gift, alms, etc.) and use this property if they know that it is harâm.
If a person mixes the property he has obtained in a way that is harâm with other property earned in a halâl or harâm way and gives alms from this mixture and expects thawâb from it, he does not become an unbeliever, for it becomes his own, yet foul, property when it is mixed. He owes its owner. Though it is harâm for him to use it before paying its cost, it is not harâm for someone else to buy and use it.