Islam and Development

Exploring the Invisible Aid Economy

Matthew Clarke, David Tittensor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317112655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios islámicos

The study of Islam since the advent of 9/11 has made a significant resurgence. However, much of the work produced since then has tended to focus on the movements that not only provide aid to their fellow Muslims, but also have political and at times violent agendas. This tendency has led to a dearth of research on the wider Muslim aid and development scene. Focusing on the role and impact of Islam and Islamic Faith Based Organisations (FBOs), an arena that has come to be regarded by some as the 'invisible aid economy', Islam and Development considers Islamic theology and its application to development and how Islamic teaching is actualized in case studies of Muslim FBOs. It brings together contributions from the disciplines of theology, sociology, politics and economics, aiming both to raise awareness and to function as a corrective step within the development studies literature.

PART I
Islam in Development

Chapter 1
Zakat and Poverty in Islam

Jan A. Ali

Introduction

In Islam, Muslims are expected to assist each other and pay particular attention to the poor and needy in society. Very early in Islamic history, political and legal institutions emerged in which some of these responsibilities assumed a legal status whilst others were practised as social obligations or ethico-moral necessities. Among the responsibilities that became mandatory and implementable by the Islamic state were the annual disbursement of zakat (obligatory alms) and assistance to beneficiaries known as al mustahiqqin and the maintenance of dependents called nafaqa.

Islam is built upon five pillars: faith, prayer, alms, fasting, and pilgrimage and is therefore considered more than just a spiritual system. Among these pillars zakat comes in third position. It reveals Islam’s acknowledgement of the existence of poverty in society and therefore highlights an obvious relationship between charity and poverty. This is a dialectic relationship in which charity is seen to lead to the alleviation or eradication of poverty and poverty in turn leads to charity.

Zakat as a means of support and relief for the poor and needy is a divine commandment. It reflects Islam’s strong focus on social and economic justice and serves to provide, through the enforcement of social obligation, fiscal measures, and legal responsibility, a fair and equitable redistribution of wealth. Its fundamental function as a social justice practice is, through an equitable growth for all members, to alleviate affliction and maintain harmony and stability in society. Zakat is an annual financial obligation prescribed to all financially capable Muslims and is a basic institution that seeks to fulfil the needs of the poor and needy in the form of an established socio-economic security system. Of course zakat is not the only institution in Islam for the purpose of alleviating or even eradicating poverty, as other institutions such as waqf (religious endowment) and infaq (charity to please God without asking for any favour) also exist. However, it is worth noting that zakat, which is clearly prescribed in the Qur’an and sunna (tradition of Prophet Muhammad), is the most important and prominent institution of social justice and charity in Islam expressly designed as a tool for addressing poverty and fulfilling the needs of the poor and needy and, therefore, the central focus of this chapter.

Zakat clearly highlights the fact that the Islamic religion is against inequality, injustice, discrimination, exploitation, deprivation, and suffering, though its very existence also suggests that Islam acknowledges, at the same time, that poverty itself is a common social characteristic of all societies. Even historically, Muslims have demonstrated great success using zakat in addressing poverty in society, however, the successful effects of the institution of zakat has been felt only in some limited periods, otherwise poverty has widely featured in the Muslim world under all Muslim empires throughout history. A systematic and strategic approach to alleviating or eradicating poverty has rarely been undertaken and poverty alleviation has definitely failed to feature as an integral part of a universal campaign.

In the 2005 United Nation Millennium Development Goals people who were seen to be poor were those ‘individuals living in households with command over no more than $1 per day per person valued at international prices’.¹ Whilst many countries have their own measuring devices and absolute poverty lines, this is an example of the universal absolute poverty line. According to Ayub Mehar the Muslim world is the largest part of the Third World and a large part of its population is living in poverty.² The Muslim world constitutes 20 per cent of the world’s total population and 23 per cent of its surface area, yet its share of World Domestic Product is only 4.5 per cent. Also, despite the fact that Muslim countries combined have a 7.5 per cent share of global trade the rate of poverty in the Muslim World is increasing quickly. Currently there are around 1.6 billion Muslims in the world³ and 1.2 billion of them are living in Muslim countries and out of these, 650 million Muslims are living below the poverty line.⁴

Muslim countries are far worse than the rest of the world when it comes to the experiences of poverty and policies and strategies linked to poverty alleviation. The Human Development Report confirms this when it found that 21 Muslim countries out of the 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (now the Organization of Islamic Cooperation) were amongst the 36 least developed nations in the world, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.⁵ The Muslim world is vast, stretching from Senegal to the Philippines, covering six regions: North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Apart from a very few countries in Southeast Asia, such as Malaysia, and the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia, there are elevated and increasing poverty rates in both urban and rural areas of a vast majority of Muslim countries. Levels of poverty have also been linked with increasing inequality alongside declining education, employment, and productivity. In Indonesia alone, for instance, which is home to the largest Muslim population in the world, over half of the national population – approximately 129 million people – are poor or susceptible to poverty with incomes of less than US$2 per day. Bangladesh and Pakistan number 122 million each, followed by India, at around 100 million Muslims living below the poverty line.⁶ It is estimated that almost a third of Muslim countries’ populations are currently living on incomes of less than US$2 per day, accounting for more than 660 million people of the world’s poor.⁷

As such, this chapter examines the concept of zakat. It acknowledges that the concept and the institution of zakat is indeed complex, and equally complex is the relationship between poverty and zakat. It seeks to make a modest contribution to the debate surrounding poverty in Islam and zakat. The chapter highlights that poverty is a pervasive socio-economic problem in almost all Muslim societies today and recognizes that there are numerous causes of it, but opts to concentrate on economic causes of poverty only.

The chapter argues that zakat as a divine commandment and a tool for addressing poverty has failed to make its impact felt on society and bring about permanent removal of poverty among zakat recipients because zakat collections are insufficient to provide income support to all the poor in any given country. The zakat collection policies and strategies are inefficient and any attempt at alleviation of poverty through zakat disbursement needs to put a specific and strong focus on capacity building or increase the productive capacity of the poor.

The Concept of Zakat

Zakat is an Arabic term which means ‘growth’, ‘increase’, ‘that which purifies’ or ‘alms’. One will find that the reference to zakat is made over two dozen times in the Qur’an. At three places in the Qur’an God issues specific commands on the payment of zakat whilst twenty-seven times zakat and prayer are mentioned together. In one place in particular zakat is mentioned with prayers in the same sequence of verses, ‘those who humble themselves in their prayers’ (Qur’an 23: 2) and ‘who are active indeed in charity’ (Qur’an 23: 4).⁸ These two fundamental religious practices are clear indicators of the significance of the vertical relationship between Muslims and God founded on prayer and charity on the one hand, and the horizontal relationship between Muslims through dispensing part of one’s wealth to another, particularly to one in need, on the other. Paying zakat, therefore, on the part of Muslims is an act of worship and obedience to God. It is for this reason the horizontal relationship is considered by Muslims to be worship, albeit in a lower form, because it shows one’s concern for others, both at an individual level as well as at the level of the umma (community of believers). Zakat is an obligatory or legal almsgiving and is seen by Muslims as part of their service to God. God commands believers to give charity regularly and freely with a particular emphasis on concern for the poor, the needy, and the wayfarer. It is clear that zakat is an Islamic welfare and social system and one of the five pillars of Islam under which Islamic social and economic justice practices operate.

The significance of the institution of zakat can not only can be derived from the Qur’an but also from the sunna (tradition of the Prophet Muhammad), which places great emphasis on the importance and mandatoriness of zakat. In one hadith it is recorded that Prophet Muhammad instructed the governor of Yemen at the time, Mu’ādh b. Jabal (d.18/639), ‘Tell them that Allah has decreed upon them alms on their wealth, to be taken from their rich and to be given to their poor’.⁹

In the Qur’an zakat is often called ‘sadaqah’. These are two names for the same thing. In the Qur’an God says, ‘of their wealth take sadaqah that so thou mightest purify and sanctify them’ (Qur’an 9: 103) and ‘sadaqat are for the poor and the needy’ (Qur’an 9: 60).

In Islam there are two types of zakat: zakat al-fitr which is a flat ‘fee’ levied on each Muslim (except the destitute) and is due before the prayer of Eid al-Fitr (end of Ramadan celebration) and zakat al-mal which could be described as a ‘wealth tax’. It is the latter type of zakat which this chapter is concerned with and the following discussion will revolve around it.

Zakat in Islamic Law

First and foremost it is critical to bear in mind that a variety of legal views on zakat exist in Muslim communities and societies. In Sunni Islam there are four famous jurisprudential schools of thought and beyond this there are views expressed by great figures in Islamic history such as Ibn al Musayyib, ‘Umar bin Abd al ‘Aziz, Maymun bin Mahran, Abu ‘Ubaid, al Tabari, and Dawud al Zahiri. All these views represent a valuable scientific heritage. Also important to remember is the fact that shari’a injunction in each matter regarding zakat may not always be sufficient and further explanation and virtues of the rulings may be required. This is an approach no different from that of the Qur’an which not only seeks to provide rulings, but also their rationale, objectives, and benefits to humanity both at individual as well as collective levels. Having said this, all Muslim jurists agree that the shari’a (Islamic law) refers to zakat as a determined share of wealth prescribed by God to be given out to the poor and needy and ‘that the welfare of the people and relief of their hardships is the basic objective of the Shariah’.¹⁰ The shari’a concedes that the wealth remaining with the owner after the zakat has been paid is purified and he or she is then at liberty to use it freely. Payment of zakat, therefore, is an act of wealth purification which is an act of worship in itself. Apart from this, zakat payment is associated with the idea of ‘return’ in which wealth is taken away from the rich and ‘returned’ to the poor and is never taken from the rich to the rich. This idea of return can be seen in the Qur’anic text:

That which God has returned to His Messenger from the [conquered] people of the towns is for God and the Messenger and those close [to the messenger] and for the orphan and the pauper and the traveller, so...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The Invisible Aid Sector
• PART I ISLAM IN DEVELOPMENT
• PART II ISLAM IN PRACTICE
• Conclusion: Invisible Aid: Islam, Muslim NGOs and Development
• Index