Towards A Unified Zakat System

espondents would oppose imposing Zakat on investmentactivities, it was important to ask respondents for opinionsregarding factors that might be behind their objections.These respondents were provided with four possibleconsiderations and were asked to express the extent of theiragreement to each item.The overall result indicates a strong agreement between allsub-groups (with the four suggested factors) for notpreferring to pay Zakat directly to the government. As canbe seen from the mean responses to the questions, thestrongest reason appears to be that the respondents believethat Zakat is a direct responsibility of the Muslim towardsAllah. It is a duty which a person should carry out withoutthe interference of a third party. The second strongestreason, as can be seen from the ranking of the means in thefourth column, is the preference of the respondents to payZakat themselves. This is typical of Muslims today, despitethe fact that, traditionally, Zakat was paid to the state inthe time of the Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) and also during theearly periods of the Islamic Caliphate. Possible reasons forthis attitude is that Muslims have not had a unified stateand, possibly more significant, most Muslim countries hadbeen colonised for centuries. Thus, Muslims habitually payZakat directly to the needy without relying on thegovernment for distribution. This issue was raised by209