Working for Intelligence Agencies in Non-Muslim Countries
What is the ruling of a Muslim working in the department of secret investigations for non-Muslims who track Muslims? Such a person claims to have the goal of helping Islam. I hope to provide him with the evidence for this ruling based on the opinions of the early and contemporary scholars. What should we do with this person to guide him to the straight path?
This job cannot be permitted. In fact, if a person works in these investigations, he will naturally cause harm to his brothers, because he works for a salary and thus he has to cause harm to his brothers or he will be considered as being disloyal by the others. In both cases he faces dangers, either in this world or in the Hereafter. Thus, we advice everybody not to take these types of jobs. We call upon every Muslim to be honest and never to be dishonest with those who trust him, be he a Muslim or a non-Muslim. Nevertheless, none should expose himself to such work that causes harm, either to himself or to others. Therefore, he should keep himself away from such things, as one poet said:
To be safe from Salma and her neighbor, never pass by a valley that is next to her valley
Accordingly, to be safe and in order to have good relations with both Muslims and non-Muslims, one should keep himself away from such work, and he should not take a job that causes harm to people or to himself. This job involves great danger. We can never give a fatwa for the permissibility of this job as its prohibition is apparent. However, we will not deem him as a non-Muslim if he does this job. We rather say that he thus commits an enormous, evil misdeed. Allah knows best.
BismillahiRahmaniRaheem.
BarakAllahu feekum, Ya Shaykh for your fatwa. In deep respect, I wish to clarify some points:
1. Causing harm to your brothers is not the case here – this is about investigating criminal wrongdoing. Even in a Muslim state, I would assume the intelligence agencies would also be paid and would also have to stop Muslim criminals, submitting them for punishment to the Islamic Courts. If we had no ability to investigate, then our enemies would be able to destroy us from within and we would not be able to identify them, let alone stop them.
2. I would think that more harm is caused to the Jumhur by those who perform acts of extremism in the name of Islam than the harm caused by those who stop them IN the name of Islam and thus, show people by action that we oppose extremism.
3. I would add: this is not work for the Awaam. A Muslim involved should have a good grounding in Islam and have a merciful disposition so that he/she does not falsely or wrongly identify “extremism” and should be strong in absolving those who may have come under false allegations due to jealousy of other Muslims (which we have found to be the case many times).
Jazaakumullah Ya Sayyidi! AssalaamuAlaykum.