Rich Muslim?

Assalaamualaikum to my muslim brothers and sisters and a warm welcome and Hello to those who have not yet embraced, Rich Muslim is a blog dedicated to my life of pursuing the acquisition of wealth without the stigma that wealth has attracted in most Muslims' perceptions of it. Strangely it seems that money and muslim dont mix too well in the minds of many adherents and this blog tracking my activities, thoughts, business ventures etc. hopes to dispel some of the myths surrounding this phenomenon and hopefully will show how to become rich and still be a fantastically good muslim.

In fact, our faith has already shown us the methods and means of doing so but instead we have adopted the way of the world around us which in fact only leads us into poverty and debt, there are three essentials for becoming a wealthy muslim but before i get into that i will describe myself a bit and discuss first what it means to be wealthy, i.e what is the definition of wealth?

I am a natural medicine pracitioner by study but a businessman and investor by nature, my father and almost entirely family is involved in business in some way or the other though as is the norm these days my parents encouraged me to study and I also wanted to myself. I eventually chose the study of Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture and travelled to Australia to obtain my degree in the subject, dabbled a bit in business while i was there (it was a failure, but my first lessons in business nonetheless) and when i completed returned to my home country of South Africa. Thats where I am now and this is the stage for my road to wealth, halal and pure. I am married with one child.

Can't give up too much more of my identity unfortunately though in this blog the message is more important than the one delivering it. So back to "wealthy", how much is it? how would you define it, what is the tipping point that makes a person rich, which dollar/pound/rand/riyal/dinar/rupee is the one that differentiates a "poor" from an "average", an "average" from a "rich", difficult isnt it?, being a millionaire when the word was coined (excuse the pun) meant something entirely different to being a millionaire now, in Zimbabwe everyone is a millionaire because a loaf of bread costs a million dollars (zimbabwean dollars that is). So what is wealthy then, perhaps it is what and how many "assets" a person owns, lets take a look at this one, two problems here, much of what you see in the form of "zeenah", i.e adornments, cars, houses etc is not really the property of the apparent owner but rather the bank that financed it, not saying this is wrong or right, i have a car and some properties that have been financed, just questioning the definition of "wealthy", and if they are "fully paid", does that mean a person is wealthy? lets take an example, lets say i find a poor person roaming the streets and gift to that person a beautiful expensive car and home, that person is wealthy now right? not really i think, if they dont have any income to support those gifts they are useless, of course they could sell it and collect the cash, live on it until it ran out, does that make them wealthy then? This discussion may be becoming long winded so let me introduce some basics here, every person no matter how frugal or saintly has expenses, it is the nature of the world that to live means you have expenses, if you have no expenses you are dead, trust me, of course it may be that you are not paying for them but that is a different matter, the fact is that in order to live we must consume. When this is put up against ones income there are three scenarios, there are those whose income and consumption/expenses are the same, these are usually the poor in society, they live from hand to mouth, whatever they earn is immediately used for expenses, food being the priority. The second group are those who consume more than their income, i.e their income is less than their expenses, this is usually the middles class and makes up the majority of the world we look at for direction and inspiration, your typical american/south african/australian/european family, wherever banks exist and loan money to finance cars, houses etc, people will be in this class, they borrow money to buy items thay cannot afford and go increasingly into debt with very few ever getting out. The third group are those whose income exceed their expenses, these maybe the rich, it all depends on your definition, they are not necessarily the best off but at least temporarily they are better off than the other two groups, it all depends on how they achieve their income and how they utilise the excess.