Praise be to Allah.
Firstly:
If your relative tells you, “Buy a phone for me,” then he is appointing you as a proxy to buy on his behalf. Therefore it is not permissible for you to go and buy it and sell it to him, or to buy it from yourself if you already have it, unless you inform him of that, because the proxy cannot sell to himself or buy from himself.
Ibn Qudamah (may Allah have mercy on him) said: Whoever is appointed as a proxy to buy something, it is not permissible for him to buy from himself… This is the view of ash-Shafa‘i and ashab ar-ra’y."(Al-Mughni 5/237).
Secondly:
If someone appoints you to buy on his behalf but does not give you any money, then this is a combination of two things: borrowing from you and appointing you to buy something on his behalf with this loan.
Based on that, it is not permissible for you to add anything to the price of the phone, because in this case it is adding to the loan.
If someone appoints you to buy on his behalf and gives you money, then this is wakalah only, and whatever discounts or gifts and the like are given, they are for the one who appointed you as his proxy.
It says in Matalib Uli an-Nuha (3/132): If the seller gives a gift to the proxy who bought from him, it is to be regarded like a discount on the price, so it is part of the deal, because it belongs to the one who appointed him as his proxy. End quote.
It says in Fatawa al-Lajnah ad-Da’imah (14/275): The Muslim must be honest in his dealings, and it is not permissible for him to tell lies or take people’s wealth unlawfully. That includes one whose brother in faith appoints him to buy something on his behalf. It is not permissible for him to take anything from him in addition to the price for which he bought the item. Moreover, it is not permissible for the one who sells it to him to write a different price – other than the real price – on the invoice to deceive the one who appointed him as his proxy so that he can charge him more than the real value, so that the proxy can keep the extra amount. That is because this comes under the heading of cooperating in sin and transgression and consuming people’s wealth unlawfully. It is not permissible to take the wealth of a Muslim unless he gives it willingly. End quote.
Thus you know that it is not permissible to take any wealth except with the knowledge of the one who appointed you as a proxy, and that could be in two scenarios:
- If it is given as a fee for acting as his proxy.
- If you sell the phone to him, subject to the condition that you take possession of it first, or he pays you in advance (salam transaction), then you go and buy it for him (and deliver it to him later). In either case he should know that you are the seller and he is buying from you something that you own, and he should not think that he is taking from you a phone that he appointed you to buy as his proxy, because one of the conditions of a sale being valid is the consent of both parties.
See also the answer to question no. 87782 .
And Allah knows best.
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