Being poor is one of the biggest fears of people. No body wants to be poor. No one wants to to live the life of poverty. The fear of poverty is one of the many reasons which satan exploits.
He leads people to acquire wealth and he leads people to accumulate it just because they would never like to be poor. Allah swt say in Glorious Quran;
[002:268] Shaitan scares you with (the prospect of) poverty, and bids you to adopt (lewd and) shameless conduct, while Allah promises you His forgiveness and (His) bounties! Allah is the Bounteous, the most Aware.
This is true. We see it all around us. Rich are becoming richer. They do not so much as give a second thought to those who are in need. It is said that about 80 richest people in this world has the same wealth as 3.2 billion poor people across the globe have. Look at the difference between 80 people and 3.2 billion people. Can you imagine how those 3.2 billion people must be living. What needs they forgo to survive? For the poor, all it means to live is mostly to just survive. While, for the rich, living means all the fun! This is why no one wants to be poor. Allah swt say in Quran;
[017:100] Say, “Even if you had treasures of what my Lord blessed you with, you would still, for fear of poverty, hold it back (not spend it).” Man is indeed stingy.All the dead cities which were found after years of digging, had one thing in common. They had wealth. All there wealth remained here and they are long gone. This is very human to accumulate wealth. But islam says to spend the wealth, no accumulate it. Here, an important thing to know is that islam is not against wealth, but it is against its accumulation.
This third caliph of Islam, hazrat Utheman r.a. Was a very rich person. When he embraced islam, he did not only adopted a simple life style but he also gave his wealth for the sake of betterment of society, in the way of Allah. In his duration of khilafah, he r.a used to take the zakat in his hand to look for anyone worthy of it, but he could not. This was the financial state of muslims in his time. All if this was achieved not because they found some treasure in the desert but because the greed of money was not there.
Prophet Muhammad pbuh said;
Bukhari, Volume 8, Book 76, Number 555:
Narrated Usama:
The Prophet said, "I stood at the gate of Paradise and saw that the majority of the people who had entered it were poor people, while the rich were forbidden (to enter along with the poor, because they were waiting the reckoning of their accounts), but the people of the Fire had been ordered to be driven to the Fire. And I stood at the gate of the Fire and found that the majority of the people entering it were women."Being poor is no sin. In fact, being poor is a state where one can learn the most harsh realities and lessons of life. One should not seek the state of poverty to learn something, but being poor should not be such a fear where one starts following satan.
