Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

Lā ta’kulā
amwālakum baynakum bi-l-bāṭil
. Then He adds a clause, He says: 
illā an takūn
tijāratan ʿan tarāḍin minkum
—unless it’s a transaction in which both of you are
in complete agreement. So, it doesn’t matter what business you go into,
whatever legitimate business you’re doing, make sure between the seller and the
buyer there is absolutely clear, crystal clear understanding of the agreement that
you have gotten involved with. So now we can think about our times, what is
Allah saying to us. This was for them back then; what is Allah saying for us.
You walk into a car dealership, guys trying to sell you a car, obviously a
salesperson wants to make his sale so he wants to hide the flaws of his used car
and he wants to highlight the benefits: ‘Look at the colour; look at the shine on
this thing’. He won’t talk to you about the transmission, conveniently, because
he knows it’s got some accidents in its past and so on. And you say, ‘Can I see
the Carfax?’ And he says, ‘No, what do you need the Carfax for? Let me tell
you. Let me give you a deal, I’m in a good mood today man. I like you, I like
your hat. So I’m gonna knock off a thousand dollars’. You know what he is
doing? This is exactly what Allah is talking about: this kind of dealing.
Now if you’re a salesman, watch out! Because when you’re in the sales
business sometimes you’ll do anything you can to get the sale. You’ll say
anything you can, to get somebody to sign off and of course we have this
incredible thing nowadays, so you have this contract between you and me. Say
I’ve bought a car and there are eighty-five pages of fine print, the entire point of
which is to protect the seller against the buyer. There are probably a lot of things
in there that if you actually understood, then you would never have signed that
paper. Guess why it’s in such a small font? Guess why it’s in such legal jargon?
The point of it is so that people don’t have transparency in their dealings.
I’ll give you another example of just how businesses do this. You go to a
commercial building and you want to rent an office. Our lease is ten dollars a
square foot, even though that is a thing of the past, we don’t get ten dollars a
square foot anymore. So you get ten dollars a square foot and the contract is for
four years. You get an email in two years, ‘The prices have gone up. We have
raised your rent to twelve dollars’. You’ll say, ‘Wait, we signed a contract. You
said ten. What’s going on here?’ ‘Oh, the fine print said based on market
fluctuation, on page 7, line 52.’ If you find yourself a microscope, you can zoom

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in enough and you will find the text says we might pull the rug from underneath
your feet whenever we feel like it. This is: 
illā an takūn tijārah ʿan tarāḍin
minkum
—except if it is a transaction that is mutually agreed upon by both sides.
I’m not talking about just scamming businesses here; I’m talking about
ourselves. Many of you are professionals, and given the track record of the
Muslim community in the US, many of you are probably in the technology
industry. So you are contractors, you are programmers, you are consultants, you
are network administrators, some of you are accountants, some of you are
physicians. Let’s just say you’re a programmer, or a contractor, your boss is not
hovering over your head 24/7. You walk in, you have a lot of independence,
you’re just given a task; finish this task and report it back to me, right? And
sometimes you can finish your task in twenty minutes. You’ve got seven hours
and forty minutes left to chill that day. So what are you supposed to do?
Some of you, you know what you do? You start listening to Qur’an recitation
at the office on YouTube, many companies have blocked YouTube on their
corporate machines. Thank God for 4G on your phone now, right? So you’re just
doing that at work, but you know what? You are being paid to do work. We
think that when we are at the office that is between us and the employer. Allah is
saying, No that’s my business too. How do you deal with your boss? Because
this is a 
tijārah
too; it’s a business too. If you’ve got no work to do, then go over
to your manager and say, ‘Listen, I’ve got nothing to do. I need that off my
conscience. If it’s okay for me to do nothing right now and still be paid, fine. But
I need you to know that, so we are both clear’.
Sometimes you are part of an organization that sells services to another
company. They say, ‘We’ll provide a contract to you, if you sign off for us we
can finish this project in six months’. So you have a contract that we are going to
finish this job within six months, and you have the wherewithal to finish it in
two months. But if you finish it in two months you can’t bill them by the hour
can you? You can’t milk every last penny you can? So you stall it. And even if
you finish your work you take it to your manager and he says, ‘Just relax man,
it’s okay, we got time, because we got to bill this thing out.’ This is an unethical
business practice and you should call it out. You can’t just be complacent, as a
Muslim, in that situation; you actually have to call it out. We can’t stand idly by
when people are cheating other people with money and we know about it. You
cannot get around the idea by ‘everybody’s doing it, what can I do?’ Everybody
does that, you can’t. You and I can’t; we are people of conscience. We have to
answer to a much higher authority, so we have to have a higher level of

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conscience in our business dealings.
Similarly those of you that are employers and have employees, you have
people that work for you. Make sure there is a clear understanding about what
their job description is, what is expected of them, what is voluntary and what is
paid for, and don’t put undue pressure on them. Salary and things like that
should be clear, absolutely crystal clear, there should be no surprises. This is the
beginnings of a Muslim community, can you imagine. The first thing Allah talks
about—take care of business. You know why? Because when you don’t take
care of business, all kinds of corruption enters into a society that aren’t limited to
business alone. When people don’t worry about how they are making a buck,
then they lose their moral compass and then they stop caring about the other;
because when you care about the other you can’t get away with doing what you
do, you have to kill your conscience, little by little.
This is why the very next words in the