The ruling on an employee blurring the images in his manager’s work magazine

The questioner : May Allah bless you. Our Shaykh, a questioner says: I receive from people, or on their covers, images of women, for example, and men send them to my superiors at work. Is it permissible to hide and destroy them, since I am unable to understand those images and give them to the superior?

The Shaykh : If he is able to alter them, it is obligatory for him to do so. He must change them, and I think blurring is easy, because there are pens now that you run over the image and it blurs it.

The questioner : If the superior does not allow him to do so.

The Shaykh : If he does not allow it, he cannot do it. If this falls under the statement, “If he cannot [do it], then with his tongue,” he must advise the superior, especially if this magazine is a picture magazine, because in some magazines the purpose is not the images, but they contain images, so one distinguishes between these and those. For example, *Al-Musawwir* magazine is entirely for images, and the like of it. But a da'wah magazine, or a literary magazine, or a news magazine, and images appear in them without intention, there is no harm in that.