534 – Qabisah ibn Mukhariq al-Hilali (may Allah be pleased with him) said: The Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) declared, “Soliciting alms is lawful only for one of three people: (1) a man who has assumed a financial liability in order to reconcile others; for him, asking is permissible until he obtains what will repay it, after which he must refrain; (2) a man whose property has been ravaged by a calamity that obliterated his wealth; for him, asking is permissible until he secures a subsistence level of living; and (3) a man whom poverty has stricken, so that three men of sound judgment from among his own people stand and testify, ‘So-and-so has been overtaken by need.’ For him, asking is permissible until he secures a subsistence level of living. Anything beyond these cases, O Qabisah, is illicit; whoever takes it consumes the unlawful.” Narrated by Muslim, Abu Dawud, Ibn Khuzaymah, and Ibn Hibban (1).
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Vocabulary of the hadith:
– man: in the genitive, an apposition to “three,” or in the nominative, understood as “one of them.”
– tahammala: he bore or undertook a burden.
– hamālah (with open ḥāʾ and a light mīm): the liability a person assumes on behalf of another to mend relations and avert or quell discord.
– until he obtains it: the pronoun does not refer to “asking” or to “hamālah,” but to whichever of the two meanings applies—that he recovers what he obtained through asking, or the amount he paid in hamālah.
– jāʾiḥah (with voiced jīm): an agent noun from jāḥat-hu yajūḥu-hu, meaning “it annihilated him”; here it denotes a heaven-sent disaster beyond human control that destroys property, such as flooding or hail,