Syed Huzaifah Ali Nadwi
Cambridge, UK
There are moments in a community’s intellectual life when an institution remains publicly revered, yet its meaning is quietly displaced. The vocabulary is preserved; the pillar is affirmed; the familiar phrases are repeated. And yet the thing itself, the moral reality of it, has begun to shift. Zakah, I fear, stands at risk of precisely this kind of drift.
The problem is not that Muslims deny zakah. On the contrary, we are perhaps more fluent than ever in speaking about it. We calculate it with precision, create campaigns around it, build entire professional sectors upon it, and speak confidently of “impact,” “sustainability,” “empowerment,” and “long-term uplift.” In many places, we have even developed a subtle pride in how modern and sophisticated our zakah infrastructures have become. But religious maturity requires us to ask a question that precedes all of this: what is zakah for?
That question may sound disarmingly simple in a world trained to think in terms of systems and scalability. Yet the Sharīʿah itself teaches that function must precede framework. When function is forgotten, frameworks become the instruments by which we rationalise our instincts. And because the modern instinct is to treat every resource as capital and every obligation as a mechanism, the temptation grows to interpret zakah primarily through the lens of leverage and growth.
The Qur’an does not speak of zakah as leverage. It speaks of zakah as moral correction. It is not presented as a voluntary act of generosity by the affluent. It is presented as a right embedded within wealth, a right that must be delivered.
Consider the Qur’anic insistence that wealth is never morally private in an absolute sense:
وَفِي أَمْوَالِهِمْ حَقٌّ لِلسَّائِلِ وَالْمَحْرُومِ
“And in their wealth there is a rightful share for the beggar and the deprived.” (Q 51:19)
And again:
وَالَّذِينَ فِي أَمْوَالِهِمْ حَقٌّ مَعْلُومٌ لِلسَّائِلِ وَالْمَحْرُومِ
“And those whose wealth contains a known right for the beggar and the deprived.” (Q 70:24–25)
This language matters. It shifts the moral centre of the discussion. Zakah is not “my donation.” It is not philanthropy. It is not a personal kindness. It is farḍ. It is an obligation owed to Allah, and a right owed to those whose deprivation the Qur’an refuses to romanticise. It is also an act of purification: wealth is cleansed through its transfer, and the giver is refined through surrender.
The Qur’an’s concern with economic concentration is not merely descriptive; it is normative. It speaks with unease about wealth becoming a closed circuit:
كَيْ لَا يَكُونَ دُولَةً بَيْنَ الْأَغْنِيَاءِ مِنْكُمْ
“So that it does not merely circulate among your rich.” (Q 59:7)
Even though this appears in the context of communal wealth distribution, the moral logic cannot be missed. The Qur’an does not want a society in which wealth becomes a private carousel for the affluent, while the vulnerable survive on precarious margins. Zakah is one of the divinely mandated mechanisms by which that carousel is interrupted.
There is perhaps an instructive parallel here with the function of the Friday khuṭbah. At one extreme, it becomes detached from the lived realities of the community — abstract, distant, and irrelevant. At the other extreme, it becomes performance — polished, emotive, topical, yet subtly theatrical. In both cases, the original function is displaced. The khuṭbah was legislated as remembrance, admonition, moral recalibration — not as spectacle, and not as empty ritual. Zakah faces a similar risk. If it becomes administratively efficient yet spiritually hollow, or strategically ambitious yet morally displaced, it may retain its structure while losing its soul.
And yet, we increasingly live in a moment where zakah is discussed and sometimes deployed in a manner that risks reabsorbing it into precisely the kind of affluent enclosure the Qur’an warns against. The language of “investment” has entered the zakah imagination. In some circles, zakah is spoken of as seed capital, as a development fund, as a tool for growth, as a pathway toward organizational sustainability. We hear of zakah as if it were a portfolio.
Some have extended this reasoning further, arguing that the Qur’anic category of al-muʾallafah qulūbuhum permits the allocation of zakah toward political actors or campaigns in order to influence policy and secure benefit for the Muslim community. Classical jurists did indeed discuss circumstances in which leaders of influence were given funds to repel harm or secure stability. Yet even within that juristic discourse, such allocations were treated as contextual instruments, not as the defining face of zakah. The verse itself begins not with influence but with deprivation. Hermeneutically and morally, that ordering is not incidental.
This is where the ethical tension becomes unavoidable. There is a difference between using zakah wisely and using zakah as an organizational growth engine. There is a difference between equipping a poor person with what restores dignity and independence, and treating zakah itself as capital to be “worked” so that it can generate returns. The first keeps the recipient at the centre; the second risks shifting the centre to the organization.
At this point, a defensible critique must be honest and careful. Islamic law is not simplistic. It is not blind to the complexity of poverty. It recognises that need is not always solved by immediate cash distribution. It recognises debt, cyclical hardship, and structural factors that trap people. It has categories broad enough to accommodate real-world complexity, as in the famous verse of recipients:
إِنَّمَا الصَّدَقَاتُ لِلْفُقَرَاءِ وَالْمَسَاكِينِ وَالْعَامِلِينَ عَلَيْهَا وَالْمُؤَلَّفَةِ قُلُوبُهُمْ وَفِي الرِّقَابِ وَالْغَارِمِينَ وَفِي سَبِيلِ اللَّهِ وَابْنِ السَّبِيلِ
“Zakah expenditures are only for the poor, the needy, those employed to administer it, those whose hearts are to be reconciled, for freeing slaves, for those in debt, in the path of Allah, and for the stranded traveller.” (Q 9:60)
Yet the existence of legitimate breadth is not a licence for moral displacement. The verse begins where the Qur’an wants our attention to begin: with the poor and destitute.
Even where jurists upheld the continuing validity of the muʾallafah category, they did not invert the hierarchy of zakah. Influence was treated as secondary to need. Exceptional allowances were never meant to become normative structures. What begins as contextual ijtihād can, if unguarded, become habitual policy.
This is the crux of the problem: when people are hungry, unclothed, homeless, unable to heat their homes, crushed by rent arrears, or strangled by debts contracted through necessity, it is morally grotesque to speak casually of “investment models” for zakah. One can argue technical permissibility for many things, but the Sharīʿah’s moral architecture consistently privileges the removal of harm and the urgent relief of hardship. The ethical shape of zakah is immediate before it is strategic.
At the same time, zakah is not reducible to humanitarian aid. Its first meaning is purification. It transforms the giver before it transforms the system. The poor are best served when the wealthy understand that their wealth is not fully theirs until it has been purified.
What has made the contemporary drift particularly dangerous is that it coincides with a thinning culture of voluntary giving. Many Muslims have come to treat zakah as the entirety of their financial religion. They discharge it once a year, experience a sense of spiritual completion, and move on. But zakah is not the summit of generosity. It is the minimum. It is the floor, not the ceiling.
During a recent visit to Canada, my father-in-law, Mawlānā Mohammad Fazlur Rahim Mujaddidi Sahab (the current General Secretary of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board), made a remark that has continued to deepen my reflection on this issue. He observed that in many communities we have spoken about zakah so frequently, structured it so thoroughly, and institutionalised it so extensively that people now subconsciously equate it with charity itself. Zakah has come to stand in for generosity. Once it is discharged, the conscience rests. Yet zakah is not charity in its fuller spiritual sense; it is obligation. Charity, in its deeper meaning, lies beyond compulsion. It is voluntary giving in which one feels the cost. The Prophet ﷺ alluded to this higher station when he taught that the upper hand is better than the lower, and when he described the most virtuous charity as that which is given while one is still attached to wealth and fears poverty. True ṣadaqah unsettles the nafs. It leaves a trace.
This shift has civilisational consequences. Historically, Muslim societies built their great public institutions not by stretching zakah until it became indistinguishable from a general charity budget, but through ṣadaqah and waqf. Zakah ensured that the poor were protected as a matter of right. Waqf funded long-term public benefit. Ṣadaqah supplied the surplus of compassion that goes beyond obligation.
It must also be said clearly: Muslim charitable organizations today operate within a complex, highly financialised environment not of their own making. In modern societies where wealth and poverty are geographically and socially segregated, many Muslims do not directly encounter visible deprivation. Organizations therefore perform a necessary and often admirable service in bridging that gap, enabling zakah and ṣadaqah to reach places and people the donor would otherwise never see. The critique here is not an indictment of their sincerity, but a call to refine the moral imagination that shapes how zakah is understood and presented.
Classical fiqh discussions on tamlīk — the transfer of ownership — were not merely technical. They reflected a protective instinct: zakah must involve real relinquishment. It requires transfer, not retention; surrender, not circulation; ownership by the poor, not managed capital awaiting return.
Zakah is meant to purify. The more we turn it into a means of reputation, organizational branding, or strategic positioning, the more we risk hollowing out the spiritual work that the farḍ was meant to perform within the giver.
The modern world has trained us to ask what an organization can “produce.” But not every institution of the Sharīʿah is designed for maximisation. Some are designed for restraint. Zakah restrains accumulation. It restrains indifference. It restrains the human tendency to normalise inequality. It disciplines the affluent before it empowers the vulnerable.
When we treat zakah primarily as a tool for growth, we impose upon it a foreign telos. We risk turning worship into finance, and obligation into strategy. And we risk reaching the most troubling stage of all: a time when Muslims rationalise directing zakah toward abstract ambitions while the vulnerable remain unfed.
Zakah was revealed to prevent a society in which affluence coexists comfortably with destitution. If our zakah ecosystems allow that coexistence to persist while celebrating “impact,” then we have preserved the form and lost the soul.
There is, therefore, a clear corrective. Zakah must be restored to its centre. The poor must return to the heart of our moral imagination. We must recover the civilisational architecture in which zakah is the minimum and ṣadaqah and waqf carry the weight of organization-building and long-term development. Farḍ is not the end of giving, and compliance is not generosity.
Above all, we must restore the discipline of asking about function before framework. If we begin with function, our frameworks will serve revelation. If we begin with frameworks, revelation will be bent to serve our instincts.
And the poor will pay the price if we choose wrongly.
