Rates and percentages in real life

This lesson asks you to pose and solve problems about rates, percentages and proportions in various contexts. The museum offers one context, the fixed portions in zakat, and no worked problems, and it gives the portions as one author lists a rule, not as guidance; the other contexts are for your class to bring. ¹

Start from the fraction each name states, then write it as a percentage and as a decimal. Compare the portions: which is largest, and by how many times?

Read the record's definition slowly. The jurists define zakat as the transfer of a fixed portion of a defined wealth to a defined recipient ^{2 3}: the portion, the wealth and the recipient are each fixed. The record then names the book that sets the thresholds down. Abu'l-Wafa' al-Maraghi lists them in his Qadaya, beginning with five camels, thirty cattle and forty sheep ⁴. The word itself has its own account. In his commentary on Qur'an 2:43, al-Tabari says the root of zakat is growth and increase of wealth, and it is so called because God increases what remains with its owner when he gives it out. He gives a second possible sense, that it purifies what is left of the wealth, and says he prefers this second sense ^{5 6}.

The record gives the thresholds and rates as one author lists them, in one book, and cites its pages ^{4 7}. The definition rests on the same book, which reports what the jurists define ^{2 3}. Al-Tabari is a different kind of witness: a commentary on the meaning of a word, not a list of amounts ⁵. Ask of each: what can one author's list tell you about what the schools held, and what can it not tell you?

The record gives its portions as one author lists them. Take a position and answer the strongest objection to it: may a student treat Abu'l-Wafa' al-Maraghi's list as "the rate of zakat", or only as "the rate in this author's list"?

• Zakat (alms tax): the definition, the thresholds, the rates and the commentators on the word.
• Sadaqa: how the jurists use a word that covers zakat and voluntary alms.
• Saving (idkhar): where the jurists place wealth whose zakat is unpaid.

Read the Overview section of Zakat (alms tax), where Abu al-Wafa al-Maraghi lists the thresholds and rates, and no further. Write three problems of your own, each using a different portion the record names and an imagined amount, and solve them with percentages.