Developing software that might be used in selling unlawful food items

3-1-2018 | IslamWeb

Question:

I work for a software company as a senior software engineer. My company, let us call it Company X develops a software for Company Y, which is another software company located in US. The service which we provide eventually generates some report using millions of pieces of data to aid big organizations to take their business decisions. Company Y sells our software service to another food supplyer company, Company Z. So Company Z can generate reports using various customers, products, manufacturers, and distributors. A customer can buy various food items which may have many manufacturers and distributors. The problem is that the food items may contain some haram items, like alchohol, pork, etc., along with many halal items, like fruits, chicken, beef, etc. I actually work in the back-end team, where I do not have any idea whether the item is halal or haram. The only thing that I know is some code of those items. When we finish our back-end part, we develop some API's (application programming interface). Another team develops the front-end part, and they use our API's to generate reports using the back-end logic. I also need to test the front-end part. When I started testing the front-end, I saw some food items, including alchohol and pork, because in the front-end, we do not use the code anymore; we use the respective items' descriptions. So my question is: is it halal for me to work in Company X and help develop that software, which may help some third party organization to buy and sell some halal and haram things, though I am not directly connected with the buying and selling?

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Answer:

All perfect praise be to Allah, the Lord of the worlds. I testify that there is none worthy of worship except Allah and that Muhammad, sallallaahu ʻalayhi wa sallam, is His slave and Messenger.

Based on our understanding of your question, we do not believe that there is any objection to your working in the company to which you referred as X and developing those software programs for it.

Allah knows best.