Cloth kept back by a tailor: may it be accepted as a gift

Question

The question is this: a tailor is my friend, and his son also studies with me. This tailor says: “I will give you a Nehru-style waistcoat; I have a piece of cloth, ten years old, left over from someone’s sherwani (a long buttoned coat worn by men).” The tailor is a Muslim and also prays, but since whatever cloth tailors keep back, they keep back by theft, I have this very suspicion that it is perhaps stolen.

Answer

Since the habit of tailors is, as a rule, well known and widespread — that they steal cloth and keep it — and your tailor himself also does not remember whether he kept it by theft or with permission, and it is also known that it is not cloth he bought himself, and you hold the predominant opinion that it is stolen, then do not take it.

Source: Fatawa Mahmudiyya

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