Government Prize Bonds Halal?
With utmost respect for your continued guidance, I humbly submit that the random selection process you highlighted is not inherently synonymous with gambling under Islamic principles, but rather aligns with the established legal concept of Qur’ah (drawing lots) for the distribution of a lawful gift. In Islamic jurisprudence, when an indivisible benefit, privilege, or reward must be allocated fairly among equals, utilizing random chance is fully permissible and rooted in primary sources. The Qur’an explicitly mentions the drawing of lots to determine the honorable guardianship of Hazrat Maryam (Surah Ali ‘Imran 3:44) and in the historical account of Prophet Yunus (Surah As-Saffat 37:141). Furthermore, it is a well-documented Sunnah in Sahih Al-Bukhari that the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) would draw lots (Qur’ah) among his wives to determine who would accompany him on journeys. In all these sacred instances, many hoped for the benefit, but only one was selected entirely by random chance without exerting physical effort or entering a competition, yet this random allocation was fundamentally Halal because no one lost any inherent rights or wealth in the process. Applying this established principle to Premium Prize Bonds, the concept of “effort” must be viewed through the lens of capital provision. In Islamic finance frameworks like Mudarabah, the capital provider (Rabb-ul-Mal) earns a return entirely without physical labor or competitive effort, simply by providing the financial foundation. Here, citizens provide the capital foundation for state infrastructure. The government, rather than extracting usury, sets aside a specific, lawful incentive budget from the project’s utility as a voluntary gift (Hiba) to the lenders. Because distributing this specific bonus pool equally among millions of bondholders would result in mathematically insignificant fractions for each person, the state utilizes the completely Halal mechanism of Qur’ah (drawing lots) to distribute these consolidated state gifts. Since the underlying capital is completely safe, and the reward is a state-funded gift distributed via a Prophetically-sanctioned method of random allocation rather than a zero-sum wager where one’s gain is strictly another’s loss, this framework safely distances itself from the prohibited elements of Maysir (gambling).
The examples are irrelevant. In the case of guardianship of Maryam, it was not a benefit but a responsibility. In the case of the wives of the Prophet, the lottery was drawn to accompany the Prophet, which was not their right, but a privilege given to them. This is unlike a pool of money in which everyone has a right, and their right is given to a few.