53 - Again in the book World's Peace and Islam, Sayyid Qutb wrote:

"Personal property cannot be made from plunder, robbery, usurpation, theft, bribes, deceit, interest, profiteering or ways which cause them. The government may add it to its treasury, wholly or partly, whenever it wants. Historical examples indicate that the government has been given this right entirely."

He went wrong again. It is true that such unjust earnings cannot be halal. The government has to get them back, not whenever it wants but immediately. But what the government takes back cannot be its own. It should transmit them to their owners. The duty of the government is to get the oppressed person's due from the cruel one. If the government, 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 bait al-mal in the fifth volume of Radd al-mukhtar, Ibn Abidin wrote: "The property obtained in a haram way, for example, that which is usurped, should be returned to its owner. Such a property cannot be bait al-mal's. It cannot be a common property for all Muslims, either." The properties that have been collected illegitimately from the people, i.e. the usurped property, cannot be owned by the government. They should be returned to their owner or, if they are dead, to their inheritors. If their owners are unknown, they should be distributed to the poor. It is haram for those who know them to get or use them.

If a person, though he knows its owner, does not return the property haram for him, and if he expects to be rewarded in the next world for doing with it a charitable deed such as building mosque or giving alms, he becomes an unbeliever. And if others who know that the property was haram for him say that he has earned thawab, 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 distribute to the poor with the intention that its thawab be given to them. It is haram to use it for something else. It is haram for others also to buy (or accept as a gift, alms, etc.) and use this property if they know that it is haram.

If one mixes the property he has obtained in a haram way with another property earned in a halal or haram way and gives alms from this mixture and expects thawab 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 haram for him to use it before paying its cost, it is not haram for someone else to buy and use it.