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Is going to a consumer establishment that sells alcohol to buy food items for the poor considered a sin, based on the hadith: "May Allah curse the one who looks at alcohol"?

1 min readAlso available in العربية

All praise is due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon the Messenger of Allah, and upon his family and companions. To proceed:

It is permissible to purchase from places that sell both permissible and impermissible items, as long as your intention in entering them is to buy permissible things. The polytheists used to sell forbidden items, yet Muslims dealt with them in permissible matters. The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, dealt with non-Muslims without partaking in their sins or condoning them. Ibn al-Arabi said: "The correct view is the permissibility of dealing with them despite their usury and their committing what Allah, the Exalted, has forbidden to them, for decisive evidence has been established for that from the Quran and Sunnah." As for the mentioned hadith, we do not know of any basis for it in the authoritative collections of the Sunnah.

Summarized from the full answer at Ftawy · reviewed Sep 2, 2026

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