Poverty and the structures that answer it: zakat and waqf

Look at what each structure takes and from whom, and what it gives, to whom and for how long. Ask what would have to be measured to know that it really alleviated poverty.

Read the structure as a table of who pays and who receives. The record of zakat reports the Muwatta's saying of the Prophet ﷺ that there is no alms on fewer than five camels, five uqiyya of silver or five wasqs of dates ². It reports the Kuwaiti Encyclopaedia of Fiqh on the Prophet's instruction to Mu'adh for Yemen, that God had imposed a sadaqa on their wealth, "taken from their rich and returned to their poor" ³. On the receiving side, the Encyclopaedia of Islam article lists eight classes of recipients, understood to be exhaustive: the poor, the indigent, collecting agents, those whose hearts are won over, slaves, debtors, those in the path of God, and travellers ^4 5. Notice that one rule sets a floor under what is taken, and another names who receives it.

Is zakat a ritual or a system of revenue? The Encyclopaedia of Islam article calls the law of zakat a hybrid of ritual and revenue-raising ⁶. Insofar as paying zakat is a ritual of purification, attention falls on the payer; as a system of revenue, it falls on the recipients ⁶. For the modern period it describes a shift from zakat as an act of piety to zakat as the base of an Islamic economic order ⁷. One fact the record gives tests the revenue view: the article says that by about 493/1100 state collection had largely ended across the Muslim world for most Muslims, and that where officials vanished, intermediaries filled the gap, from village imams to Sufi orders ⁶.

The TDV encyclopedia says that in history waqf was not a single institution but a "system" with two parts: the charitable buildings that served people, such as the mosque, college, soup kitchen and fountain, and the income-producing property whose rent paid for them, such as shops, inns, baths and land ⁸. Founders of charities built commercial premises alongside them to cover salaries and upkeep ⁸. The Fatih complex in Istanbul, for example, was endowed with 4,250 shops in Istanbul and Galata, three commercial inns, four bathhouses, a covered market and 1,130 houses, all let for the waqf's account ⁸.

The two records offer different kinds of figure. For zakat, the record gives thresholds and the schools' disagreements, with the Muwatta and the Kuwaiti Encyclopaedia of Fiqh as sources for the Prophet's sayings, and it reports the positions side by side and rules on none of them ⁶. For waqf, the figures come from one encyclopaedia: each of the imarets of Istanbul fed between 500 and 1,000 people a day, in the eighteenth century more than thirty thousand ate in them daily, and the fourteen imaret complexes built by Mimar Sinan employed 2,529 people ⁸. These count meals and staff. Neither record gives a figure for how many people left poverty.

The records name two structures. One is a duty on wealth above a threshold, paid to named classes, whose state collection had largely ended across the Muslim world by about 493/1100 ⁶. The other is a system of endowments that funded kitchens, colleges and hospitals, and that successive states sometimes tried to take but mostly protected ⁸. Take a position: which of the two does the evidence in the records better show alleviating poverty, and what is the strongest objection to your position?

• Zakat (obligatory alms): the thresholds, the recipients, how collection changed and the modern re-examination.
• Waqf: the endowment that keeps the capital and gives the yield, and the kitchens, colleges and hospitals built on it.
• Zakat (alms tax): the jurists' definition and the thresholds as al-Maraghi lists them.