Unjustly profiting from others (is the worst)

5th of Ramadhan 1441 Hijriah (28th April 2020)

Due to the terrible internet connection of my previous provider, I decided to change to another one. I asked my previous provider to stop my internet service immediately, so that I wouldn’t have to pay anymore for their service. It turns out that stopping the service was not as straightforward as I thought it would be. A week after I asked for termination of my internet subscription, I still didn’t get confirmation of termination. I called three times, and finally after two weeks of going back and forth, the provider said that my internet subscription was terminated. 

There seems to be a conscious effort to keep customers subscribed to the contract and make the process of terminating it a tedious process. Perhaps so that the customer has to pay for the next bill, even though the customer doesn’t use the service anymore. This also happened when I wanted to terminate my cable TV subscription a while ago (they still haven’t collected the decoder that they lent to me, and it’s already a year since I terminated my contract). Quite unfortunate, but it seems that profit is the main priority for these companies, and the normal practice in Indonesia.

It was quite different from my time in Japan. If we wanted to terminate a subscription, be it of an internet service, cable TV, gas, electricity, or other utilities, the customer service of the company did their best to make the process as quick as possible, to avoid burdening the customers with fees that they could avoid.

In the Islamic tradition, there is a verse in the Quran that strongly forbids us from eating other people’s wealth unjustly (benefiting from other people by treating them unjustly). Interestingly in the verse, the act of eating other people’s wealth unjustly was coupled with the act of murder, which is universally recognized as one of the worst crimes that a person can commit. So in other words, the verse implies that unjustly benefiting from other people’s wealth is a serious crime comparable to murder. Because in reality, to a certain extent, when we consciously unjustly benefit from others, we are hurting them with our actions.

The difficult times that we’re living in is often made as a justification for taking other people’s wealth unjustly. While in truth, these difficult times should make us protect other people’s rights even more. Because they are also in difficulty, and it is morally unethical to make it even more difficult for them. So whenever we think about unjustly taking or benefiting from others’ wealth, we should remind ourselves that we are causing hurt to others.

-Fendrri

#Islam #Justice #AlImran #Reflection #Quran #Ramadhan #CeritaKamiRefleksi