May I Buy Games From a Company That Once Disrespected Islam?

Answered by Shaykh Faraz Rabbani

Question

A video game company included content disrespectful to Islam in some of its older games. Some of it was later removed, though perhaps not all, and its modern games seem free of such material. The same is true of other companies, whose older works contained offensive content alongside much that is unobjectionable. Does buying a modern game from such a company mean supporting or approving its past actions? Must I boycott the company entirely, or may I distinguish between the objectionable content and its other products?

Answer

In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.

May Allah reward your care in this. You may buy the game (if the game is in itself permissible), and you are not obliged to boycott the company.

You have already drawn the two distinctions that matter, and both hold. Buying a lawful product is not approval of the seller’s past conduct. Assistance in sin means contributing to the sin itself, and an ordinary purchase of an unobjectionable product, years after the fact, is too remote from the wrong to carry it. Nor does discontinued conduct attach itself to everything a company touches thereafter.

Boycott, when called for, is recommended but not obligatory. That is the position I have given before, and it holds here. So you may boycott and be rewarded for the intention, and you may decline to and not be blamed. Where a company still produces the objectionable material, avoiding those particular products is the sounder course. Where it does not, the matter is open.

Your parallel with other studios is well taken, and the general principle is the one you were reaching for. Judge the product you are buying, not the producer’s entire history. A company is not a person who repents; it is an entity whose output changes. Look at what is in your hands.

Buy with a Clear Conscience, and Keep the Standard on the Content

The ruling follows what you are actually buying, if it is permissible in itself. So the standard worth holding is the one on the game itself rather than on the company behind it: free of mockery of the religion, of obscenity, and of anything that pulls at your faith. Keep that, and buy without unease.

And Allah knows best.

Faraz Rabbani

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