Islam's Reformers .pdf

“Zakât is collected from the main wealth in a ratio of twoand-a-halfper cent every year. The state collects this tax as itcollects any other tax. It is the state again which is in charge ofits expenditure. It is not a procedure that takes place betweentwo individuals face to face. Zakât is a tax. The state collects itand spends it on certain places. Zakât is not an individual gift ofalms that passes from hand to hand.“If, today, some people divide the zakât of their property bythemselves and distribute it with their own hands, this is not theway or system which Islam commands.”Sayyid Qutb, being unable to refrain from repeating IbnTaimiyya’s words on zakât, disagreed with the Ahl as-Sunnascholars also on this point. Mawdûdî and Hamidullah, too, writethe same about zakât. The four madhhabs of the Ahl as-Sunnaunanimously report that ‘zakât’ means ‘to give (tamlîk) a certainpart of one’s fully possessed zakât goods obtained in a halâlway to seven out of eight kinds of Muslims decribed in theQur’ân al-kerîm’. In the Hanafî madhhab, it can be given evento only one of them. These seven kinds of Muslims are: faqîr;miskîn; ’âmil, the collector of the zakât of stock animals and thatof farm products called ’ushr; one who is on hajj or ghazâ; onewho is far away from his home or property; one in debt; theslave who is to be set free. It is commanded in the Qur’ân togive zakât also to the eighth class, i.e. people called almuallafatal-qulûb who were some disbelievers, who werehoped to become Muslims or whose harm was to be prevented,or some weak Muslims who had newly embraced Islam.Rasûlullah (’alaihi ’s-salâm) had given zakât to all these threekinds of people. But Hadrat ’Umar (radiy-allâhu ’anh) who wasin charge of Bayt al-mâl during the time of Hadrat Abû Bakr(radiy-Allâhu ’anh), quoted an âyat-i-kerîma, which is recordedin Ibn Âbidîn, and a hadîth, which is known as the hadîth ofMu’âdh and which the same source reports to exist in all the(books of hadîth called) Kutûb-i-sitta [1] , and said thatRasûlullâh (’alaihi ’s-salâm) had abolished the payment of zakâtto al-muallafat al-qulûb. The Khalîfa and all the Sahâbat al-[1] Its lexical meaning is ‘The Six Books’. In the Islamic terminology, itsignifies the six most famous books of hadîth written by six greatIslamic scholars. Detailed information is available in the sixthchapter of the second fascicle of Endless Bliss.- 205 -