Backbiting & Lying in Islam: Quranic Warnings New

The Islamic Ruling on Backbiting (Gheebah), Tale-bearing (Nameemah), and Lying

“Al-Ajwibat al-Sadidah ‘ala al-As’ilat al-Rashidah” – (Part 12)

From: Allamah Zayd bin Muhammad bin Hadi al-Madkhali (may Allah have mercy on him)

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

Question 13: What is the definition of backbiting (Gheebah), and what is the evidence of its prohibition from the Book (Quran) and the Sunnah?

Answer: The Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) defined backbiting in these words:

“ذِكْرُكَ أَخَاكَ بِمَا يَكْرَهُ، قِيلَ: أَفَرَأَيْتَ إِنْ كَانَ فِي أَخِي مَا أَقُولُ؟ قَالَ: “إِنْ كَانَ فِيهِ مَا تَقُولُ فَقَدِ اغْتَبْتَهُ، وَإِنْ لَمْ يَكُنْ فِيهِ فَقَدْ بَهَتَّهُ”.

“(Backbiting is) to mention your brother in a way that he dislikes.” It was said: “What if what I say about my brother is actually true?” He replied: “If what you say is in him, you have backbitten him, and if it is not in him, then you have slandered him.” [Sahih Muslim: 2589]

The evidence for the prohibition of backbiting is this statement of Allah the Almighty:

{وَلَا يَغۡتَبْ بَّعۡضُكُمۡ بَعۡضًا‌ ؕ اَ يُحِبُّ اَحَدُكُمۡ اَنۡ يَّاۡكُلَ لَحۡمَ اَخِيۡهِ مَيۡتًا فَكَرِهۡتُمُوۡهُ‌} – [Al-Hujurat: 12]

"And do not backbite one another. Would one of you like to eat the flesh of his dead brother? You would hate it."

And the evidence from the Sunnah is the statement of the Prophet (ﷺ):

“يَا مَعْشَرَ مَنْ آمَنَ بِلِسَانِهِ وَلَمْ يَدْخُلِ الْإِيمَانُ قَلْبَهُ لَا تَغْتَابُوا الْمُسْلِمِينَ وَلَا تَتَّبِعُوا عَوْرَاتِهِمْ، فَإِنَّهُ مَنِ اتَّبَعَ عَوْرَاتِهِمْ يَتَّبِعُ اللَّهُ عَوْرَتَهُ وَمَنْ يَتَّبِعِ اللَّهُ عَوْرَتَهُ يَفْضَحْهُ فِي بَيْتِهِ”.

“O company of people who have believed with their tongues but faith has not yet entered their hearts, do not backbite the Muslims and do not seek out their faults. For whoever seeks out their faults, Allah will seek out his fault, and whoever’s fault Allah seeks out, He will expose him even in his own home.” (1) [Sunan Abi Dawood: 4880, Imam al-Albani said: Hasan Sahih]

Furthermore, regarding its severe danger, the Prophet (ﷺ) said:

“لَمَّا عُرِجَ بِي مَرَرْتُ بِقَوْمٍ لَهُمْ أَظْفَارٌ مِنْ نُحَاسٍ يَخْمُشُونَ وُجُوهَهُمْ وَصُدُورَهُمْ فَقُلْتُ: مَنْ هَؤُلَاءِ يَا جِبْرِيلُ؟ قَالَ: هَؤُلَاءِ الَّذِينَ يَأْكُلُونَ لُحُومَ النَّاسِ وَيَقَعُونَ فِي أَعْرَاضِهِمْ”.

“When I was taken on the night journey (Mi’raj), I passed by a people who had fingernails of copper and were scratching their faces and chests with them. I asked: ‘O Jibril, who are these people?’ He said: ‘These are the ones who used to eat the flesh of people (backbite) and attack their honor.'” [Sunan Abi Dawood: 4878, authenticated by al-Albani]

Allah the Almighty has declared backbiting to be a great injustice that will wipe away good deeds on the Day of Resurrection. Consequently, the backbiter will be deprived of the reward of his good deeds and become bankrupt, as narrated by Sayyiduna Abu Hurairah (may Allah be pleased with him), who said that the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said:

“مَنْ كَانَتْ لَهُ مَظْلَمَةٌ لِأَخِيهِ مِنْ عِرْضِهِ أَوْ شَيْءٍ فَلْيَتَحَلَّلْهُ مِنْهُ الْيَوْمَ قَبْلَ أَنْ لَا يَكُونَ دِينَارٌ وَلَا دِرْهَمٌ، إِنْ كَانَ لَهُ عَمَلٌ صَالِحٌ أُخِذَ مِنْهُ بِقَدْرِ مَظْلَمَتِهِ، وَإِنْ لَمْ تَكُنْ لَهُ حَسَنَاتٌ أُخِذَ مِنْ سَيِّئَاتِ صَاحِبِهِ فَحُمِلَ عَلَيْهِ”.

“Whoever has wronged his brother concerning his honor or anything else, let him ask him for forgiveness today, before a day comes when there will be no Dinar nor Dirham. If he has any good deeds, they will be taken from him according to the extent of his injustice. And if he has no good deeds, the sins of his (oppressed) companion will be taken and placed upon him.” [Sahih al-Bukhari: 2449]

I (the author) say: O Muslim men and women! It is more befitting for us to be engaged in correcting our own faults and to refrain from being occupied with the faults of others. If we see a Muslim brother or sister disobeying Allah or violating the teachings brought by the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ), we should advise them with sincerity. We should fill our gatherings with the remembrance of Allah and related matters, and avoid “Qal wa Qeel” (he said, she said), i.e., useless talk and rumors, because from these (backbiting and useless talk), nothing will be gained on the Day of Judgment except regret and remorse.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

Question 14: What is Nameemah (tale-bearing), and what is the evidence of its prohibition from the Book and the Sunnah?

Answer: Nameemah (tale-bearing) means to convey the words of one person to another person, or the words of one group to another group, with the intention of creating corruption. The evidence for its prohibition in the Holy Quran is the statement of Allah the Almighty:

{وَلَا تَبۡغِ الۡـفَسَادَ فِى الۡاَرۡضِ‌ؕ اِنَّ اللّٰهَ لَا يُحِبُّ الۡمُفۡسِدِيۡنَ} – [Al-Qasas: 77]

Translation: "And seek not corruption in the land. Indeed, Allah does not like the corrupters."

Similarly, the following statement of Allah the Almighty also indicates its prohibition:

{هَمَّازٍ مَّشَّآءٍۢ بِنَمِيۡمٍۙ‏} – [Al-Qalam: 11]

Translation: "A slanderer, going about with malicious gossip."

And the evidence from the Sunnah is the hadith in which the Prophet (ﷺ) said:

“شِرارُ عبادِ اللهِ المشّاؤونَ بالنَّميمةِ، المُفرِّقونَ بينَ الأحِبَّةِ، الباغونَ للبُرَآءِ العَيبَ”.

"The tale-bearers, those who create separation between friends, and those who seek faults in the innocent and pure are the worst individuals of this Ummah." [Sahih al-Targhib (2824)]

I (the author) say: Then there is no cause for surprise or denial in the statement that a tale-bearer causes far more corruption than the magic of a magician. This is because a magician generally creates corruption between an individual or a few limited individuals, and its effect is confined to those upon whom the magic is cast. In contrast, the tale-bearer and fault-finder create severe discord among individuals, groups, and various classes of the entire Ummah, especially among those who are acquaintances, loved ones, and relatives. Protection from such tribulations is possible only with the guidance and help of Allah.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

Question 15: What is the ruling on lying in the Islamic Sharia? What is its danger to the Ummah? And what is the evidence of its prohibition from the Book and the Sunnah?

Answer: Lying is forbidden (haram) in the Islamic Sharia; in fact, it was also declared forbidden in all previous divine laws. The evidence for its prohibition is the statement of Allah the Almighty:

{وَلَا تَقۡفُ مَا لَـيۡسَ لَـكَ بِهٖ عِلۡمٌ‌ ؕ اِنَّ السَّمۡعَ وَالۡبَصَرَ وَالۡفُؤَادَ كُلُّ اُولٰۤئِكَ كَانَ عَنۡهُ مَسۡئُوۡلًا} – [Al-Isra: 36]

Translation: "And do not pursue that of which you have no knowledge. Indeed, the hearing, the sight and the heart - about all those [one] will be questioned."

And the statement of the Prophet (ﷺ):

“وَإِيَّاكُمْ وَالْكَذِبَ، فَإِنَّ الْكَذِبَ يَهْدِي إِلَى الْفُجُورِ، وَإِنَّ الْفُجُورَ يَهْدِي إِلَى النَّارِ، وَمَا يَزَالُ الرَّجُلُ يَكْذِبُ وَيَتَحَرَّى الْكَذِبَ حَتَّى يُكْتَبَ عِنْدَ اللَّهِ كَذَّابًا”.

“And beware of lying, for lying leads to wickedness, and wickedness leads to the Fire. A man continues to lie and seeks to lie until he is recorded with Allah as a liar.” [Sahih Muslim: 2607]

And what greater proof of the danger of lying can there be than what Jibril (peace be upon him) said to the Prophet (ﷺ):

“وَ الَّذِي رَأَيْتَهُ يُشَقُّ شِدْقُهُ فَكَذَّابٌ يَكْذِبُ بِالْكَذْبَةِ تُحْمَلَ عَنْهُ حَتَّى تَبْلُغَ الْآفَاقَ فَيُصْنَعُ بِهِ إِلَى يَوْمِ الْقِيَامَةِ”.

“And the one you saw whose jaw was being torn apart was a great liar, who would tell a lie that would be carried from him until it reached all horizons, and this will be done to him until the Day of Resurrection.” [Sahih al-Bukhari: 6096]

One type of lie is what people call joking, although in reality, it is neither a joke nor Tawriyah (saying something that has a double meaning). This is because this type of joke is contrary to reality both in its apparent and hidden meaning. For example, telling someone, “Come, I will give you such-and-such,” and then when the person comes, giving them nothing and making the excuse that you were just joking. Or telling someone that a certain person has arrived or that you have received a certain thing, when in reality, it is not so. All these and similar examples are explicit lies from which complete avoidance is necessary. It is obligatory to admonish those who consider such things to be permissible joking.

So if someone says that the Prophet (ﷺ) also used to joke with his companions, we will reply to them: “Yes, but he (ﷺ) always spoke truthfully and in accordance with reality, or it was a permissible type of ambiguous speech (Tawriyah).” As it is narrated that he (ﷺ) said to an elderly woman:

“لَنْ تدخُلَ الجنَّةَ عجوزًا”.

“No old woman will enter Paradise.” [Al-Silsilah al-Sahihah (2987)], then when she became sad, he (ﷺ) said to her that Allah the Almighty says:

{عُرُبًا اَتۡرَابًاۙ} – [Al-Waqi’ah: 37]

"Loving and of equal age."

(Meaning, they will enter Paradise in a young and beautiful state).

I (the author) say: Since the matter is such, we should fear Allah concerning ourselves and act upon the command of our Lord:

{يٰۤـاَيُّهَا الَّذِيۡنَ اٰمَنُوا اتَّقُوا اللّٰهَ وَكُوۡنُوۡا مَعَ الصّٰدِقِيۡنَ} – [At-Tawbah: 119]

"O you who have believed, fear Allah and be with those who are true."

Therefore, we should adhere to truthfulness in our words, deeds, and dealings, with our Lord and with all people, and remember that Allah calls to the Home of Peace (Paradise) and guides whom He wills to a straight path.

(To be continued…)

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

(1) At this point, it is necessary to clarify an important issue: criticism and commentary against the people of innovation (Ahl al-Bid’ah), the people of desires (Ahl al-Ahwa), and those who openly commit sins do not fall under the category of forbidden backbiting, provided that wisdom is observed and a greater good is intended. This will not be considered as searching for slips or trying to expose faults and mistakes. Similarly, warning the Muslims against those who call towards innovations (newly invented deviations) through their writings and speeches is also not forbidden backbiting. Rather, it is a form of religious advice (naseehah) so that Muslims can be protected from the tribulations of these innovators.

Some scholars have described the situations exempted from the prohibition of backbiting in the form of poetry, in these words:

Speaking of a fault is not backbiting in six situations:

(1) A complaint by the oppressed against the oppressor.

(2) For the purpose of identifying a person.

(3) To forbid evil and reform a sinner.

(4) Against a person who openly commits transgression (fisq) or innovation (bid’ah).

(5) For seeking a religious verdict (fatwa) from scholars.

(6) To save people from the evil of a person.

I (the author) say: And in this regard, there are many texts and sayings from the Quran, Hadith, and the آثار (narrations) of the Salaf (pious predecessors), which are not hidden from those who understand the universal legal principles of Sharia and its noble objectives. Therefore, they should be sought in their relevant places.