Islamic Rulings on Backbiting & Lyin New

Al-Ajwibat-us-Sadidah: Rulings on Ghibah, Namimah, and Lying

“Al-Ajwibat-us-Sadidah ‘ala-l-As’ilat-ir-Rashidah” – (Series 12)

From: ‘Allamah Zaid bin Muhammad bin Hadi Al-Madkhali (Rahimahullah)

Question 13: What is the definition of Ghibah (backbiting), and what is the proof of its prohibition from the Qur’an and Sunnah?

Answer: The Noble Prophet (PBUH) defined Ghibah 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”.

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

The proof for the prohibition of backbiting is this statement of Allah Ta’ala:

{وَلَا يَغۡتَبْ بَّعۡضُكُمۡ بَعۡضًا‌ ؕ اَ يُحِبُّ اَحَدُكُمۡ اَنۡ يَّاۡكُلَ لَحۡمَ اَخِيۡهِ مَيۡتًا فَكَرِهۡتُمُوۡهُ‌} – [الحجرات: ١٢]

“And do not backbite one another. Would one of you like to eat the flesh of his dead brother? You would hate it.” – [Al-Hujurat: 12]

And the proof from the Sunnah is this saying of the Prophet (PBUH):

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

“O assembly of those 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 Allah seeks out his fault, He will disgrace him in his own home.” (1) [Sunan Abi Dawood: 4880, Imam Al-Albani said: Hasan Sahih]

Furthermore, regarding its (backbiting’s) severe danger, the Prophet (PBUH) 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 Mi’raj (Ascension), I passed by a people who had fingernails of copper and were scratching their faces and chests. I asked: ‘Who are these, O Jibril?’ He said: ‘These are the ones who used to eat the flesh of people (backbite) and attack their honor.'” [Sunan Abi Dawood: 4878, Sahih Al-Albani]

Allah Ta’ala has declared backbiting to be a great oppression that will erase 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 from Sayyiduna Abu Hurairah (RA), who said that the Messenger of Allah (PBUH) 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 a grievance (wrongdoing) against his brother concerning his honor or anything else, let him seek his pardon today, before the Day when there will be no Dinar and no Dirham. If he has any righteous deeds, they will be taken from him according to his wrongdoing. And if he has no good deeds, the sins of his (wronged) companion will be taken and placed upon him.” [Sahih Al-Bukhari: 2449]

I (the author) say: O Muslim men and women! It is more appropriate for us to engage in correcting our own faults and 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 (PBUH), we should advise them with sincerity. We should populate our gatherings with the remembrance of Allah and related matters, and avoid “Qal wa Qil” (he-said, she-said), i.e., useless talk and rumors. Because from these (backbiting and useless talk), nothing will be achieved on the Day of Hereafter except sorrow and regret.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

Question 14: What is Namimah (tale-bearing), and what is the proof of its prohibition from the Qur’an and Sunnah?

Answer: Namimah (tale-bearing) means to convey one person’s words to another person, or one group’s words to another group, with the intention of causing corruption. The proof of its prohibition in the Holy Qur’an is the statement of Allah Ta’ala:

{وَلَا تَبۡغِ الۡـفَسَادَ فِى الۡاَرۡضِ‌ؕ اِنَّ اللّٰهَ لَا يُحِبُّ الۡمُفۡسِدِيۡنَ} – [القصص: ٧٧]

Translation: “And do not seek corruption in the land. Indeed, Allah does not like the corrupters.” – [Al-Qasas: 77]

Similarly, this statement of Allah Ta’ala also indicates its prohibition:

{هَمَّازٍ مَّشَّآءٍۢ بِنَمِيۡمٍۙ‏} – [القلم: ١١]

Translation: “A slanderer, going about with malicious gossip (Namim).” – [Al-Qalam: 11]

And the proof from the Sunnah is the Hadith in which the Prophet (PBUH) said:

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

“The worst of Allah’s servants are those who go about with Namimah (slander), those who sow discord between loved ones, and those who seek faults in the innocent and pure.” [Sahih al-Targheeb (2824)]

I (the author) say: Then there is no wonder or denial in this matter if it is said that the tale-bearer causes far more corruption than the magic of a sorcerer. This is because the sorcerer generally causes corruption between one individual or a few limited individuals, and its effect is limited to those upon whom the magic is cast. Whereas the tale-bearer and fault-finder create severe discord among the individuals, groups, and various classes of the entire Ummah, especially between those who know each other, love each other, and are relatives. Protection from such tribulations is possible only with the Tawfiq (success) of Allah and His help.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

Question 15: What is the ruling on lying in Islamic Shari’ah? What is its danger to the Ummah? And what is the proof of its prohibition from the Qur’an and Sunnah?

Answer: Lying is Haram (prohibited) in the Islamic Shari’ah; in fact, it was also declared Haram in all previous divine laws. The proof of its prohibition is the statement of Allah Ta’ala:

{وَلَا تَقۡفُ مَا لَـيۡسَ لَـكَ بِهٖ عِلۡمٌ‌ ؕ اِنَّ السَّمۡعَ وَالۡبَصَرَ وَالۡفُؤَادَ كُلُّ اُولٰۤئِكَ كَانَ عَنۡهُ مَسۡئُوۡلًا} – [الإسراء: ٣٦]

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.” – [Al-Isra: 36]

And this saying of the Prophet (PBUH):

“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 Fujur (wickedness, evildoing), and Fujur leads to the Fire. A man continues to lie and seeks to lie until he is written with Allah as a liar.” [Sahih Muslim: 2607]

And what greater proof can there be of the danger of lying than what Jibril (AS) said to the Prophet (PBUH):

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

“And the one whom you saw, whose cheek was being torn, was a great liar. He would tell a lie that would be carried from him until it reached the horizons. This will be done to him until the Day of Resurrection.” [Sahih Al-Bukhari: 6096]

One type of lying is also that which people call “joking,” whereas in reality, it is neither a joke nor Tawriyah (equivocation; a statement that is technically true but intentionally misleading). This is because this “joke” is contrary to reality in both its apparent and hidden meanings. For example, saying to a person, “Come, I will give you such-and-such,” then when the person comes, nothing is given, and the excuse is presented, “I was only joking.” Or saying to someone that “so-and-so has arrived” or “I have received such-and-such,” when in reality it is not so. All these and similar examples are explicit lies from which complete avoidance is necessary, and it is obligatory to make those people understand who consider such things to be permissible joking.

So if someone says that the Prophet (PBUH) also used to joke with his Companions, we will answer him: “Yes, but he (PBUH) always spoke the truth and what was in accordance with reality, or it was a permissible type of ambiguity (Tawriyah), as it is narrated that he (PBUH) said to an elderly woman:

“لَنْ تدخُلَ الجنَّةَ عجوزًا”.

“An old woman will not enter Paradise.” [Al-Silsilah al-Sahihah (2987)], Then when she became sad, he (PBUH) said to her that Allah Ta’ala’s statement is:

{عُرُبًا اَتۡرَابًاۙ} – [الواقعة: ٣٧]

“Loving and of equal age.” – [Al-Waqi’ah: 37]

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

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

{يٰۤـاَيُّهَا الَّذِيۡنَ اٰمَنُوا اتَّقُوا اللّٰهَ وَكُوۡنُوۡا مَعَ الصّٰدِقِيۡنَ} – [التوبة: ١١٩]

“O you who have believed, fear Allah and be with those who are true.” – [At-Tawbah: 119]

Therefore, we must adhere to truthfulness in our statements, actions, 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 juncture, it is necessary to clarify an important point: criticizing and commenting on the Ahl al-Bid’ah (people of innovation), Ahl al-Ahwa’ (followers of desires), and those who openly commit sin does not fall under the category of prohibited backbiting, provided that wisdom is observed and a (Shari’ah) benefit is intended. This will not be considered searching for slips or an attempt to expose faults and mistakes. Similarly, warning Muslims against those who call towards Bid’ah (innovations in religion) through their writings and speeches is also not prohibited backbiting. Rather, this is a form of Nasiha (sincere advice) prescribed by Shari’ah so that Muslims may be protected from the fitnah (trials, tribulations) of these innovators.

Some scholars have stated the exceptions to the prohibition of backbiting in the form of poetry, in these words:

Stating a fault in six situations is not backbiting:

(1) The complaint of an oppressed person against the oppressor.

(2) For identifying a person.

(3) To forbid evil and correct the sinner.

(4) Against a person who openly commits Fisq (transgression) or Bid’ah (innovation).

(5) Consulting scholars for a fatwa (legal ruling).

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

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

Urdu Translation: Umm Muhammad Khushnuma Muslihuddin