Bribery is not only unethical or a social wrong; in Islam it is a grave sin. An explainer from Prothom Alo's religion desk sets out whether Islamic law prescribes a specific punishment for it.
The hadiths it cites curse both the giver and the taker of a bribe (Sunan Abu Dawud, hadith 3580), and a narration in al-Mu'jam al-Awsat of al-Tabarani (hadith 3899) says both will go to hell. The Quran also forbids consuming other people's property unjustly.
On punishment, the explainer says that, unlike theft or adultery, bribery has no fixed and unchangeable penalty set by the Quran or hadith. It is therefore not a hadd offence but a tazir offence: one whose punishment is left to the judge's discretion.
The aim of tazir is to rid society of crime and reform the offender. According to the explainer, Islamic jurists agree that a state may apply the strictest tazir to curb a crime as serious as bribery, because a single bribe can send an innocent person to prison or deprive the rightful party of what is theirs.
Alongside punishment, the law provides for confiscating what was gained by bribery. Such wealth can never be made lawful for the taker; it must go back to the person it was taken from or, failing that, to the public treasury (bait al-mal). The explainer cites Ibn Abidin's Hanafi work Radd al-Muhtar (5/100) on this point.
Its conclusion: the absence of a fixed hadd does not make bribery a minor offence. A judge may punish it severely, and for a Muslim, returning the money is the way to be free of the debt.
Photo: money passed in a handshake (illustrative), Kiwiev / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
Source: Prothom Alo
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