Article & fatwaHigh trust

Who pays for the prize?

Who pays for the prize? Resolution No. 127 (1/14) 'Contests Cards' is the OIC Fiqh Academy's settled ruling on the everyday face of maysir — prize draws, entry coupons, paid competition calls, promotional giveaways and the airline and hotel points card — turning on one test: a competition is gambling the moment its prize is funded by the people competing for it.

What this source says

Almost every Muslim household in the West meets maysir long before it ever meets a casino. It arrives as a scratch card at the till, a text-to-enter competition, a raffle at a fundraiser, a 'spin to win' banner, a supermarket giveaway, a frequent-flyer card. Resolution No. 127 (1/14) 'Contests Cards' is the OIC Fiqh Academy's settled ruling on exactly this everyday layer — and it hands the ordinary reader a single, usable test.

WHY THIS IS A RIBA-FREE QUESTION. Maysir sits beside ribā and gharar as the third prohibition governing how a Muslim may and may not acquire wealth. The corpus already carries the general explainer on maysir as a concept; what it lacked until now was a PRIMARY collective ruling on the forms an ordinary household actually encounters. Res 127 is that ruling, and it is unusually practical: it does not stop at 'gambling is forbidden' but works out which competitions are lawful, which are gambling in a friendlier costume, and where the line runs between them.

WHAT A CONTEST IS. Head First defines the category broadly, taking in both the paid and the unpaid: 'A contest is a transaction based on the competition of two persons or more for realizing or performing a task against a reward (prize) or without reward (prize).' Note that a contest is not presumed sinful. It is a transaction like any other, judged by its terms.

THE UNPAID CONTEST IS SIMPLY LAWFUL. Head Second begins with the easy case: 'A contest without reward (prize) is permissible in all matters that are not prohibited by Shariah or lead to skipping of a Shariah duty or committing a forbidden act.' Competition itself is not the problem.

THE FOUR CONDITIONS FOR A PRIZE. Where there IS a prize, head Second sets out that 'A contest with reward is permissible subject to the following criteria:' — four of them. The subject matter must be clean: 'The objectives, means, and areas of the contest should be permissible.' The end must be clean: 'The ultimate end of the contest should be acceptable in Shariah.' It must not crowd out religion: 'It should not lead to skipping a Shariah duty or committing a prohibited act.' And then the decisive one, the condition that does nearly all the work in modern consumer life: 'The reward (prize) should not be resourced from all contestants.'

THE ONE TEST TO CARRY. Ask who funds the prize. If the pot is made up of what the entrants themselves paid in, the contest is a redistribution of the losers' money to the winner — that is gambling, whatever it is called. If the prize is funded by a promoter out of their own pocket, and the other three conditions hold, the competition can be lawful. Res 127 then applies that test across the forms.

ENTRY COUPONS AND CARDS. Head Third is explicit: 'Contest cards (coupons) in which part or all of the proceeds are used for the prize are not permissible according to Shariah because they are a kind of gambling.' Note the reach of 'part or all' — a scheme is not rescued by funding only some of the prize pool from entry money. The raffle whose ticket sales pay for the hamper falls here, however good the cause.

BETTING ON AN OUTCOME. Head Fourth closes the side door: 'Betting between two parties or more on the result of a material or immaterial act by any others is prohibited on the basis of the texts of the Quran and the Sunnah, which prohibit gambling.' Staking money on what someone else will do — a match, a race, a result — is the prohibited thing itself.

PAY-TO-ENTER BY PHONE. Head Fifth is the ruling that catches the premium-rate line and the paid entry text, and it names the wrong precisely: 'payment for telephone calls for participation in contests is prohibited if the amount paid or part of it is used in the prizes; this is in the forbiddance of unlawful acquisition of people's properties.' The conditional matters — the objection is not to paying for a call, but to a call charge that is quietly recycled into the prize fund. Again: who pays for the prize.

THE PROMOTER MAY STILL PROMOTE. Head Sixth is what keeps this from being a blanket ban on marketing, and it is the clause a Muslim business owner should read twice: 'It is permissible for prizes offerers to gain the benefit from their commodities promoted through permissible contests without getting any financial gain (from the contests) provided that no part of prizes' funds comes from the contestants and that the promotion does not involve cheating, deluding, or deceiving consumers.' A business may run a genuine giveaway, may enjoy the goodwill and the sales it generates, and may treat that as its return — so long as it funds the prize itself, takes no financial gain out of the contest as such, and the promotion is honest.

NO DOUBLE-OR-NOTHING. Head Seventh forbids the escalation mechanic that turns a one-off into a habit: 'Increasing and decreasing the amount of the prize by successive gains and losses is not permitted in Shariah.' The rolling stake that grows as you win and shrinks as you lose is the engine of compulsive play, and it is ruled out by name.

POINTS CARDS: FREE YES, PAID NO. Head Eighth is the most immediately useful line in the resolution for a Western Muslim reader, because nearly everyone holds one of these: 'Cards of hotels, airline companies and other institutions, which entitle their holders to points leading to Shariah-acceptable benefits, are permissible when given free of charge. If, however, such cards are given against fees, they become not permissible for involving gharar (uncertainty).' The frequent-flyer or hotel programme you were enrolled in for nothing, earning points toward a permissible benefit, is fine. The programme you PAY a fee to join or hold becomes a purchase of an uncertain return — you hand over a known amount for benefits whose value and availability you cannot know — and that is gharar. Two riders the reader should keep straight: the benefit itself must be Shariah-acceptable, and this head speaks to the card and its fee, not to a separate question like the ribā in an interest-bearing credit facility that a rewards scheme may be bolted onto.

HOW TO USE THIS. Before entering, ask three things. Where does the prize money come from — the entrants, or the promoter? Am I paying anything to enter, and if so does any part of that payment feed the prize? Is the thing being won, and the thing being promoted, itself permissible? If the prize is funded by the house and the entry is genuinely free, head Second's conditions are within reach. If the prize is funded by the players, no amount of reframing — coupon, ticket, call, card, 'donation with a chance to win' — changes what it is.

WHY IT BELONGS HERE. A riba-free life is not only about the mortgage and the bank account; it is about the small, constant decisions in which money changes hands. Res 127 is the primary collective text beneath the corpus's existing maysir explainer, and it settles the consumer layer with a test anyone can apply at the till. It is a universal ruling — the questions it asks about a competition are the same in any market, whatever the local law on lotteries, promotions or loyalty schemes happens to permit.

Wording inside quotation marks is quoted from the source. The rest is this notebook’s summary of it — read the original before relying on it.

Provenance

Compiled from: Compiled 2026-07-25 from the International Islamic Fiqh Academy's OWN OFFICIAL ENGLISH text of the resolution. PRIMARY AND SOLE AUTHORITY FOR EVERY VERBATIM SPAN ATTRIBUTED TO RES 127: the IIFA Official Edition (Oct 2021), Resolution No. 127 (1/14). Every quoted span was machine-verified as an exact substring of that official-edition extraction (build_res127.py) AND embedded verbatim in this article body. No figure, rate, currency, count, year, provider/scholar grade, madhab tally, vote count, statute, regulator or named institution has been added; no Qur'an verse or ḥadīth wording/number is reproduced (Res 127 quotes none — head Fourth's 'the texts of the Quran and the Sunnah, which prohibit gambling' is a category reference, not a scripture citation).
Source: PRIMARY TEXT (the title; the operative heads First–Eighth including the four lettered conditions under head Second; the Recommendations line and the devotional close). Every verbatim span attributed to Res 127 was machine-verified as an exact substring of the IIFA Official Edition (Oct 2021) extraction under a canonical normalisation, and each substantive span is embedded verbatim in this article body (build_res127.py: span verification + three settledness gates + head-count and Recommendations-PRESENT assertions + two negative controls + no-figure + no-scripture, all PASSED).
School / basis: Comparative fiqh of maysir (gambling) and gharar in consumer transactions with a PRIMARY OIC collective text. Resolution No. 127 (1/14), 14th session (Doha, State of Qatar). Eight settled operative heads (First..Eighth) plus four lettered conditions under head Second, followed by a Recommendations section (settled but recommendation-bearing, i.e. CONFINED — like Res 140/145/178/200/212/224/238, not fully settled like Res 141/143/157/194). Every head is quoted; none is outside the corpus's riba-free scope.
Original: https://iifa-aifi.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Resolutions-Recommendations-of-the-IIFA-Official-Edition-Oct-2021.pdf
Captured: 2026-07-25
Added: 2026-07-25
Trust: Primary or near-primary source with a stable public URL.

Compiler’s note

Added 2026-07-25 (auto-run, P2 corpus standing track). Chosen the instructed way: LISTED content/articles/ and diffed against the source table of contents for a genuinely UNCOVERED, SETTLED, SUBSTANTIVE resolution with strong riba-free relevance AND >=5 NATURALLY NUMBERED operative units (so the thinness gate clears WITHOUT semantic-split assist). Rejected this run, each re-verified ON DISK: Res 167 (5/18) Maqāṣid and their Role in Deriving Shariah Rulings — settled across 8 heads and finance-touching at head Eighth, but its heads are EXHORTATIVE rather than dispositive ('Importance of recalling...', 'The need for studying...') and its own Recommendations call on the Secretariat 'to commission further research to elaborate on the meaning of the objectives of Shariah', i.e. the elaboration is handed forward — a weak operative core beside Res 127; Res 78 (9/8) and Res 96 (4/10) Credit Cards — both UNNUMBERED PROSE (0 numbered heads, 0 numbered sub-points), thinness-gate-incompatible, and the subject is already covered on disk by Res 108 and Res 139; Res 231 (2/24) Inflation and the Changing Value of Currency — 4 heads and a three-fold subject overlap with the covered Res 42/75/115; Res 74 (5/8) Islamic Market — fully settled 6 heads but almost entirely cross-referential (a survey/map). Res 127 (1/14) 'Contests Cards' is the clean pick. All three checks re-run ON DISK: UNCOVERED (no *resolution-127* file; the corpus carried a SECONDARY explainer on maisir/gambling as the third prohibition beside ribā and gharar, but NO primary OIC ruling on the everyday consumer forms of maysir — this is the same anchor-a-standing-explainer pattern as Res 141->maslaha, Res 140->waqf and Res 145->takaful); SETTLED (its 'Resolves' rules the subject across EIGHT numbered heads First..Eighth, every one a decisive disposition, with NO defer/postpone token of any kind in the block — the keyword gate is vacuously clean); CONFINED (a Recommendations section follows the eight heads — the gate ASSERTS Recommendations PRESENT so a future edition dropping it fails loudly, as with Res 140/145/178/200/212/224/238); SUBSTANTIVE (8 heads + 2 numbered sub-points + 4 lettered conditions = 14 operative units, well over units>=5 WITHOUT any semantic-split assist; the gate asserts exactly 8 heads). THE LOAD-BEARING CLAUSE: head Second's condition b, 'The reward (prize) should not be resourced from all contestants' — the who-funds-the-prize test that separates a lawful promotional giveaway from gambling, and the test heads Third (entry coupons), Fifth (paid competition calls) and Sixth (promoter-funded promotions) each apply to a different modern form. Head Eighth is the most directly actionable line for a Western Muslim reader: hotel/airline points cards are permissible when given FREE of charge, but 'given against fees, they become not permissible for involving gharar (uncertainty)' — the article states the two riders honestly (the benefit must itself be Shariah-acceptable; the head speaks to the card and its fee, NOT to any interest-bearing facility a rewards scheme may be attached to, which is the separate ribā question of the covered Res 108/139). Three settledness gates on the operative block: 0 keyword, 0 paraphrase, 14 units. TWO CONTROLS: Res 77 (8/8) paraphrase-only; Res 122 (4/13) both gates. NO-FAB: NO figure/rate/currency/count/year in any quoted span (the only numerals in any quoted span are the resolution/session ids 'No. 127'/'(1/14)') and NONE in the body — the session year is deliberately kept OUT of the body (the 14th session, Doha, State of Qatar is recorded in the madhab field without a year); NO Qur'an verse or ḥadīth wording/number (Res 127 quotes none — head Fourth's 'the texts of the Quran and the Sunnah, which prohibit gambling' is a CATEGORY reference, quoted as the resolution's own words, not a scripture citation, and carries no verse wording or number); no scholar/board/provider grade, madhab tally, vote count, statute, regulator or named institution; the 'how to use this' three questions are Res 127's own conditions restated, not added doctrine. build_res127.py all source spans + all substantive spans embedded-in-JSON + three gates + 8-head assertion + Recommendations-PRESENT assertion + two controls + no-figure + no-scripture PASSED; persisted to .audit/scripts/. Articles 149->150, corpus total 247->248. GLOBAL-FIRST: universal OIC ruling on competitions, prizes and points cards — the who-funds-the-prize test applies to a Muslim entering a promotion in any market, whatever the local law on lotteries, raffles or loyalty schemes permits; no AU baseline. NEXT candidate: scan content/articles/ against the source ToC for the next UNCOVERED/SETTLED/SUBSTANTIVE finance-relevant resolution with >=5 NATURALLY NUMBERED operative units. Res 74 (5/8) Islamic Market remains available as a fully-settled 6-head survey/map article if a consolidated 'how the instruments fit together' entry is wanted; the finance-relevant well in the official edition is now close to dry. AVOID the logged whole-subject deferrals (Res 22/32/33/45/77/87/88/89/111/112/119/122/124/156/182-Second/187/188/189/190/195/196-Third-4/214/230/237) and the thinness-gate-incompatible unnumbered-prose/low-unit rulings (Res 78/96/121/168/232) and the exhortative/overlapping ones (Res 167/231).

Topics

maysirgamblingcontestsprize-drawsrafflescompetitionsloyalty-pointsfrequent-flyerghararconsumer-financepromotions-marketingfiqh-of-transactionsoic-fiqh-academyiifa

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