Seadet-i Ebediyye - Endless Bliss Sixth Fascicle

As for the clause, “... who utters the Basmala knowingly...,”
(which is written a few pages earlier in the text;) what is meant by
that is: “... although he is aware of the harâm element in what he is
eating or doing... .” If that person does not know about its
existence he will be excusable and pardonable. In Muslim
countries, nay, all over the world today, it is easy for Muslims to
learn the Ahkâm-ı-islâmiyya, i.e. Islam; so it will be an inexcusable
sin not to learn and know a necessary amount of Islam’s teachings.
What is excusable, however, is to make inadvertent mistakes in
practising those teachings. For instance, it is necessary to know
that is is harâm to drink wine. Being unaware of that fact is not
something excusable; it is a sin. Yet one will not be sinful for
having drunk some stewed fruit juice or any other medicinal juice
or any other sweet fruit drink mixed with wine because one was
unaware of the mixture. Unawareness of the mixture is excusable.
It is not something excusable not to know that pork is harâm; it is
a sin. Yet it is an excusable and pardonable act to eat food cooked
with pork because one has been misinformed that it was cooked
with mutton or with beef. A hadîth-i-sherîf quoted in the two
hundred and forty-sixth page of the book entitled Shir’at-ul-islâm
states as follows: “Let a person with belief in Allah and in the
Hereafter not sit at a meal table where wine is being drunk!” It is
wrong to say that it will be permissible to sit there only to please
one’s friends and not to drink wine, which is a fallacy mostly had
recourse to by bolstering the egos with the hadîth-i-sherîf that
reads: “Deeds will be evaluated dependently on intentions.” For,
intention functions in acts of worship and in acts that are mubâh,
(i.e. permissible acts that are neither commanded nor prohibited
and for which one will be either rewarded or chided, depending on
one’s intention.) Acts that are harâm will not turn into halâls on
account of one’s good intention. A person who performs a ghazâ
to make a show of valour or to earn money and/or property will
not earn thawâb for making jihâd. When mubâhs are done with a
good intention, they will generate khayr and cause one to earn
thawâb. But it is not permissible to commit an act of harâm for the
purpose of pleasing the heart of a Believer, who is one’s brother;
and a person who does so will not have availed himself of the
hadîth-i-sherîf that reads: “Allâhu ta’âlâ will please a person who
pleases a Believer.” The only excusable situation that will make
sitting there justifiable, still with the proviso that (wine) drinking
will definitely be fended off, is one which involves a darûrat and
where behaving otherwise will arise a fitna; however, one might
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