Building shops for rent in an old graveyard

Question

Facing a mosque there is a graveyard with a main road on both its sides. The mosque people want to construct rooms on both sides of this road and let them out on lease (ijara), so that the rent keeps being spent on the needs of the mosque — the salary of the imam and muezzin, electricity and so on — or on the construction of the mosque. A few decayed graves will also come within this construction. Is this construction permissible or not?

Answer

If that place belongs to the mosque, and the graves are so old that the dead no longer remain in them but have turned to dust, then, by mutual consultation, building shops there, letting them out on rent and spending that rent on the needs of the mosque, construction, and the salary of the imam and muezzin is permissible in the Shariʿa.

Source: Fatawa Mahmudiyya

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