Giving and fasting

This lesson asks you to describe actions people perform to meet the expectations of their belief tradition, and to explain practices that reflect its teachings. The museum serves the Islamic part, the obligatory alms and the fast of Ramadan; your class adds the giving and fasting of other traditions. ¹

The expectations connect what people do with what their tradition teaches. For each practice, ask who does it, how often, with whom, and what teaching you think it carries. Then compare with a practice from another tradition.

Read how the rules of one duty reach us. According to the record of zakat, the Encyclopaedia of Islam says that, apart from the Qur'anic list of recipients, the main elements of the law rest on hadith: the kinds of property liable, the minimum quantity in each case, the rate, and the one-year holding period ². The best-known traditions on camels and sheep are reports of written instructions kept as family heirlooms, among them the instructions to Amr ibn Hazm (may God be pleased with him), sent to Yemen; instructions the Prophet ﷺ is said to have prepared but not issued before his death, which Abu Bakr, Umar and later Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz carried out; and Abu Bakr's instructions to Anas ibn Malik (may God be pleased with him), sent to collect in Bahrain ². The sources say collection was already in full force in the Prophet's lifetime, and the hadith also indicates that he died before the definitive guidelines for camels and sheep were issued ².

What is the fast? The record of fasting in Ramadan gives two accounts from the Encyclopaedia of Islam. In the Shafi'i résumé the article follows, the fast in the legal sense is abstinence from the things that break it, together with a special intention, and the person fasting must be a Muslim in full possession of his senses ³. In the Kitab Asrar al-sawm of the Ihya, al-Ghazali declares that the regulations, once listed as a jurist would list them, are not what is essential, and distinguishes three steps: that of the jurists; one that suffices for the pious and consists in keeping the senses and limbs free from sin; and that of the prophets, the truthful and those brought near to God ⁴. For him the subjection of the passions, not mere abstention, is the real object of the fast ⁴. The article judges that his ethical conception supplements what it calls the barren law of the jurists ⁴. The record gives no verdict between the two.

On zakat, scholars disagree about when the duty began: a common view puts it in Shawwal of the year 2/624; others give 1/622, 4/625 or even 9/630; and another view holds that it came in general terms before the hijra and in detail at Medina ⁵. On the fast, the article gives the law of the Shafi'i school, following the treatise of Abu Shuja al-Isfahani, of the fifth Islamic century ³, and says that the three other schools differ from it on minor questions only, too tedious to list ⁴. What the record gives of the fast is therefore one school's law as one encyclopaedia summarises it, not a survey of all the schools.

Al-Ghazali holds that the subjection of the passions, not mere abstention, is the real object of the fast ⁴, while the Shafi'i résumé defines the fast as abstinence from what breaks it together with a special intention ³. If a researcher had to describe a fast to a class of mixed faiths, which of the two descriptions can an outside observer check, which can only the person fasting report, and why does that difference matter to how the researcher words the description?

• Zakat: the written instructions kept in the hadith, the schools' differences on liable property and on recipients, and the Kuwaiti encyclopaedia's definition.
• Fasting in Ramadan: the Shafi'i résumé, al-Ghazali on the steps of the fast, and the jurists on the last ten nights.

Read the records on Zakat and Fasting in Ramadan. For each, write what is done, when, and by whom, using only what the records report.