The Imam Who Spent $700,000 to Save His Reputation

Now, Imam Al Bukhari had a thousand dinar. We're talking almost a million dollars. Imam Bukhari said, I went to the edge of the boat and I threw it in the ocean. So this man said, why did you do this?

Yeah. He said, look, in this scenario, it was 700,000 USD. Some people would compromise their reputation for a thousand USD.

But think about this, right? People don't realize this, but many of these people research Islamic stuff. When ebay first came out with the idea of rating customers, you know, they took that from really.

What was the story behind this?

This is interesting again, from a business perspective. When you do business, people need to be.

Welcome to a new episode where we analyze the story of Islam and take takeaways to apply in our business and grow wealth for the sake of Allah. In today's episode, we'll speak about something that's very important. We'll speak about not just a skill, but something that's so important in your life as a business owner. Your reputation, it's something that you only have when once, and you need to preserve it for your entire life because you only have one that is beautiful.

For today's lesson, I'm going to deviate a little bit away from the sahaba.

He said this. I was about to say, okay, which sahaba is it? And he said, it's not a sahaba. So now he got my attention.

I'm going to shock you guys a little bit. And we're going to talk about one of the great scholars of Islam, Imam Al Bukhari. Imam Al Hafir, the great scholar Muhammad IBN Ismail Al Bukhari. Everybody has heard Sahih Al Bukhari. Right. But did you know how he got to be so reputable?

Not at all. That's very interesting, by the way, because we're going to speak about reputation, which is so important about business. And he authentified most of the hadith, and the vast majority of the hadith you would hear, it would be from Sahih Bukhari.

Yeah. Or the most authentic of them anyway. Imam Al Bukhari was wealthy, which many people don't realize. His father was a very strong businessman.

Okay, what was he doing?

He used to do trade or commodities. Different commodities. Not just cloth and things, but major commodities, food. So much.

So he would buy for a cheaper price and resell. That's what you mean.

He would buy and he would resell in different locations. So he would trade it. He would buy it in one location, bring it, and he would travel for business, okay? And in one of the authentic and well known stories, he went on a ship on a business journey. It's not now a religious journey, right? His father had set up the business and he had taken it to the next level. So even though he was spending his time in hadith and doing the khidma of the deen, collecting ahadith, but he was also at the same time working on his business and keeping himself independent and wealthy enough that he didn't need anybody. Now, Imam Al Bukhari on this journey had a thousand dinar, okay? A gold dinar is going to be approximately Islamic gold dinar, about 700 USD today, okay?

And he had a thousand of them.

He had a thousand of them, okay? So that's about 700,000 USD. We're talking almost a million dollars, okay? And he had this money with him to use in trade. Now he's on a ship. A man comes up to him and says, are you, are you Muhammad IBN Ismail Al Bukhari? Like he recognized him, you know, and he tells him, yes, I'm your brother, Mohamed Al Ismail. And he's like, oh, like I've heard so much about you. What are you doing, Imam Al Bukhari? Tell him, on a business trip, I've got a thousand dinar. I'm going to go to this place, I'm going to buy these products and they're going to have them shipped and we're going to sell them and this and this and this. He was very honest. This man, unfortunately, was an evil man. And many times in your business you got to deal with people like this. This man went to the captain of the boat, lied and said, somebody stole a thousand dinar from me, okay?

The thousand dinars that Imam Bukhari had.

So now the captain of the boat makes an announcement. Hey, there's a thief on this boat who stole a thousand dinar. We're going to search everybody. And if you have a thousand dinar,

then you're the one who stole it.

Then you're the one that stole it. So now they start searching one after one after one after one after. When they get to Imam Bukhari, he has nothing. So they searched the whole boat. They didn't find a thousand dinar. So it's a long journey on a boat. They go back to their daily, whatever tasks. So this thief, he comes to Imam Bukhari, he says, I'm confused. He goes, I know I lied, but I know you would never lie. So if you told me you had a thousand dinar, you had a thousand dinar. What'd you do with it? Imam Bukhari said, when this announcement was made, I went to the edge of the boat and I threw it in the Ocean. He threw 700,000 thousand gold dinar, the equivalent of 700,000 USD in the ocean. In the ocean.

And why did he do this?

So this man said, why did you do this? He said, look, if you had said, no, this is my money and you described it, maybe they would have said, keep it and they would have, you know, arrested me. If not, I could have gotten it out. But you just threw it over the ocean. Like, what good is it to anybody in the bottom of the ocean? Imam Bukhari said, I have spent a lifetime protecting my name and my reputation as the preserver and the hamil or the carrier of the authentic hadith of the prophet. Sallallahu alaihi wasallam. So for my name, my Arab to even be doubted upon to such a tuhma, such even an accusation to come to my name to me was not worth a thousand dinar. He protected his reputation even at the loss of 700,000 USD. Now think about in business, at times you might have to take a loss, at times you may have to take a knee. But when your reputation and your honor and your rep, your ability to represent your business honestly is protected, in the long run, that's worth it.

Subhanallah so many times you'd have times like you mentioned, where you're in business and you have a great reputation, you have, you've done business well for a long time, you preserve your reputation and sometimes you might be in a situation that's, we call it a sticky situation where you haven't done anything wrong. But, but in a situation where a customer is not happy, taking care of them would cause a loss, but it would save your reputation. A lot of people would not take that loss and rather damage their reputation. But Subhanallah, we learn, but this is a problem.

Even if you look at shopping today, many websites like Temu or this or that may sell a product at a lot cheaper, but people still prefer to shop at places like Amazon. Why? Because the reputation of okay reliability, accepting returns easily, being able with this peace of mind that you know what, if it doesn't work, they're going to return it for me.

But what would you say if someone wanted to protect their reputation but they were afraid of the loss they would have in this scenario, it was 700,000 USD. Some people would compromise their reputation for a thousand USD, right?

But think about this Right. Look at this scenario and how it played out. Imam Al Bukhari may have lost that wealth at that time, but Allah blessed them with the wealth later. Anyway, he continued to be wealthy all. Oh, I mean he lost that money, but he went on the trade. And what we find from the Qutub Utarikh is that the people that he was going to make the trade with trusted him enough that they sent the product even without him giving the money. And then he sold the product and he gave them the money and he made his profit. Right. He still took a loss. But look at the fact that today if you tell somebody there's hadith in Bukhari Khalas, no more questions.

There's no questions about it.

If I tell you this hadith is in Al Bayhaqi or this report Al Bazaar or something like this, you might be like, yeah, you know, but if I say Bukhari Khalas, end of conversation, how did that get to be.

And that's, that's. You can't even quantify the amount of money that this was worth. 700,000. Yes. These nothing compared to this.

I mean, thousand years Imam Bukhari has been dead, right? But till today, you look at his name, his reputation, the work that he's done, every masjid, every household has the sahih Imam Al Bukhari. And when it's mentioned, the reputation, the honor, even above Muslim and Abu Dawudir and Tirmidin, other great books. Abukhari takes a level because he took that care. Every hadith he wrote before writing it, he would make a fresh wudu and make raka tain. He'd make two raka before writing each hadith subhanallah. I mean the care, where did this come from?

Where did this care for his reputation? And being so afraid of damaging his reputation, where did this come from?

Imam Al Bukhari was a amazing character in the history of Islam from his childhood. He was very pious. As well known that when he was a young child he would be writing hadith, memorizing hadith, spending time with hadith so much that the children would mock him. The other little children tell him, how come you don't come play? And when he was forced to go play with them, he would cry, why am I wasting my time? As a child, as a child. Famous narration. Imam Bukhari, when he was in Bukhara and was current day Uzbekistan, Samarkand in that area, he was sitting in the hadith dars, but he wasn't taking notes. So the other students he saw in Each dars, he's not taking notes. They started making fun of him. Why are you wasting your time here? You're not learning anything. You're not taking any notes. He told them, look, you do you, I do me. You know, in the end, they bother him enough. He said, okay, bring all your notes. And he told them, open your notes. And then he recited every single hadith with the Sanad and every note from his memory that they had written down. See, an amazing incident. Imam Bukhari, and then this again. His reputation was protected, but it was worth it. He wasn't hype. He was actually that man. He earned it. The first time that he was going to go to Baghdad, Baghdad was the center of knowledge. There was Imam of Ahlis Sunnah wal Jamaa, Imam Ahmad Ibn Hanbal. He was in Baghdad. And Imam Al Bukhari wanted to go to Baghdad to take hadith from Imam Ahmad. In fact, in his sahih, he reports hadith from Imam Ahmad. So when he was going to come to Baghdad, a lot of hype. People said, oh, this young man who's got, you know, just like in business, if there's somebody who's got a really hot product and there's hype behind it.

Hype behind it, people want to buy it. Yeah.

So then people want to see, is this really that good? Like, you know, you want to say, peptide, do this, or you want to say this. Well, is it really that, you know, worth it?

Is the hype worth the hype? That's it.

There you go. So what they did in Baghdad, the people of Baghdad, not the scholars, but some people, they said, look, we're going to test this young man. Bukhari was very young, in his teens, you know. So they said, okay, when he comes, we're going to tell him, you know what? In your honor, we have a feast. You're a person of hadith. You're a scholar. We're going to have food, and during the feast, we're just going to have some people read hadith. Like, instead of entertainment at that time, the good people, they would just have somebody read hadith. So they didn't tell him this, but it was a test. And the test was they were going to switch up the chains of the hadith, okay?

The order.

Not the order, the chain of the narrators. Okay? So, for example, like today, we don't even think about the actual sanad. But that was the most important thing to the people of Hadith. So, for example, we would say Ibn Abi Layla reports from Abdul Akman from this, who he was from Abu Hurairah, from the Prophet. This is the chain. Right. So they kept the chain. Correct. But if this chain matched this hadith, they moved it to the next hadith, right. They said, let's see if he catches it. They took 10 people, and they tell them, read 10 hadith each. So 100 hadith. Each chain is switched to another hadith. So the chain is still correct. So, like today, I guarantee none of us would catch it at all. Right. Sima Bukhari, he comes and they're having food together, and they're sitting and they said, you know, just in your honor, we're gonna have some people read hadith. He said, okay. So one man got up and he started reading the first hadith, the second with the chain. So he said, like, you know, the whole chain. Right. Simon Bukhari, when he says the hadith, he says, I don't know this hadith. Second hadith is, I don't know it. 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th. Every time he would say, I don't know this hadith. And they say, look at all this hype about this guy. He doesn't even know this hadith. And second guy, third guy, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th. So 10 people, 10 hadith each. Everyone Imam Bukhari goes, I don't know them. So they're like, oh, you don't know any of these hadith? He goes, no, but the first chain he recited matches. The seventh chain he recited. The second chain he recited matches. The fourth one, the eighth guy did, and from his memory, he fixed all the chains.

Subhanallah.

That is a genius. Do you know that when ebay first came out with the idea of rating

customers, as it's been reported, people buy and sell.

Exactly. Were one of the pioneers of this, you know, giving ratings online. Before Amazon. Exactly. You know, they took that from Mustalal Hadith. Really? The science of Hadith.

Jarwata, what was the story behind this? This is interesting.

This is interesting. Yusuf Estes told me about this when we were sitting down one time, and then I found some writings about it as well. When they were coming up with this platform that you could buy and sell online from individuals, they had this problem of how to trust the reputation of a seller. Because these are random.

You're buying and selling from people who, like, don't. Don't own a business. They just have something at home they want to sell on ebay.

Yeah. And the people behind the business concept saw the concept of Islamic Hadith Sciences. They said, in it, you would have Alema of Jarhu Tadil. People don't realize this, but many of these people research Islamic stuff. Elon Musk and others have mentioned about how they looked into a lot of these things.

Ebay learned to start rating from what they learned from Islam, from Hadith sciences.

He said those Hadith scholars would verify narrators and many different scholars would give their ratings. And when you found scholars across the board accrediting somebody, then you would trust them in hadith. He said, then we're going to have a way that we'll have people raid the the sellers and give them a grading. And with mass gradings, we'll figure out who's trustworthy in the long run or not. So protect your reputation in the way of the salaf al Salaheen, in the way of the great scholars of the past. And even if you have to take a loss in business at times, but if it can gain you the trust of your customer, the reputation of being a solid seller who will accept a defective product, that will take a knee, but save it.

How can someone save and protect their reputation in today's day and age?

Again, from a business perspective, when you do business, people need to be able to trust that one, you're going to be selling a product honestly, and we talked about this in the last episode, but secondly, that you'd be willing to take some loss to protect your reputation. If I buy something from you and it comes out to be broken, I should feel comfortable that I can send it back to you and you're gonna refund me or fix it or make it right because you want to protect your reputation. If not, I'll buy from somebody else at a higher premium, but knowing I can trust that if it's not right, they'll fix it.

And that's very interesting that you mentioned this because Amazon literally has this policy and they're known for it for whenever a customer has an issue with the product, they would return it, they would accept it, they, they would cover the shipping fees, they would refund all your money and not take any penny from it. They would cover a loss on both shipping you the product, shipping it back to them, and not being able to sell that because you opened the box again just to preserve their reputation.

But that has now made them one of the biggest platforms and the biggest platform.

Amazon is the platform where people buy the most amount of products in the world.

Look at that. Even with all that. And we could have learned this principle from our salaf and beat them to it.

That's amazing.

Barak Allahfeeq Zakallah Khair. Another beautiful episode.

Another beautiful episode.

Another one coming soon.

Preserve your reputation. You only have one. And just like we saw, even if it costs you 700,000 USD or more, you only have one reputation. And one reputation can take you a long way. And a bad reputation can take you in a very, very bad way. So make sure you preserve your reputation and you're always honest as a business owner.