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Is palm-reading permitted in Islam ?

Dated: 30/08/1985

Location: The London Mosque

Language: English

Audience: General

Is palm-reading permitted in Islam ?

Is the reading of the hand permitted in Islam? Yes. Destiny readings, eh? Yes. The Prophet has cursed those who indulge in this practice. Who believe in this, who earn through this, you know, these things. But that curse is limited to those who believe in this as an independent phenomena of faith. But if you indulge it as a play or as a, like a feature reading or things, then this becomes a different thing altogether from the thing practiced in Arabia in those times.

So a differentiation has to be made. What was cursed by the Prophet was the doctrine that faith is independent of religion and everybody is born with a set faith which is written on his hands, which is an unchangeable factor and anybody can read it and declare it while the Holy Quran declared that the entire knowledge of future lies with Allah. It is he who reveals to whomever he pleases. So because this concept stood in contradiction with the declaration of the Holy Quran, so the Prophet condemned it and cursed those who indulge in such practices. But nowadays a new science has developed which does not declare this hand reading to be a real faith reading. Such people do not even claim, there are certain people who indulge in this science, who do not even claim that they can predict future by reading hand.

A class among them believes that the hands and the feet and their expressions, all these things carry certain messages about the inner being of the person, his dispositions, his trends and all about his psyche. And judging from that, we can predict that such a person will behave in such a manner, we can predict that such a person is disposed towards this action and that and so on. And certain temperaments are also revealed so we can say that this person will become popular or unpopular in life. If he is supposed to be very harsh, one can even predict that perhaps his married life will be unsuccessful.

But not as a prediction in the sense of the Holy Quran, but a prediction based on his character. This thing is not condemned by the Prophet. Even we find signs of approval of this reading by the Prophet because it is said that once somebody told the Prophet that a reader of feet has told that his son is not his son. Do you remember that tradition? There were errors who read physiognomy and characters from feet instead of hands. But they did not claim to be making predictions. But they claimed to read the features of the shape of the feet and their bends and also such things and read the signs in understanding the person and also they claimed that certain feet follow the shape of the parents in a manner that you can definitely declare that such a person is the son of that person or not.

If you happen to know the shape of the feet of the mother and the father then the son’s foot would be a telltale thing and if the son born to that mother also belongs to the father then it can be read from the foot. Because I don’t know exactly what passed, so I am not going to repeat that but I know, I have read this tradition where the Prophet disagreed with the inference but did not condemn this phenomenon, this science. So that shows that because this did not interfere with the declaration of the Holy Quran that nobody can share knowledge with Allah, so he had no objection against it. So in that limited sense, hand reading or feet reading is just a plaything. But if somebody begins to believe in that, somebody goes to someone and says I will read my future and pay respect to that prediction that is forbidden in Islam totally.

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Updated on November 18, 2024

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