Two of zakat's eight categories, fi sabilillah and ibn al-sabil, are almost unused in Bangladesh, even though they bear most directly on today's crisis of displaced, refugee and homeless people. So argues Dr M Kabir Hassan, professor of finance and Moffett Chair at the University of New Orleans, in an op-ed in Amar Desh. The views are the writer's own.
He starts with two sets of numbers. A Power and Participation Research Centre survey last August put poverty at 27.93 percent and extreme poverty at 9.35 percent, up from 18.7 and 5.6 percent in the 2022 BBS household survey. Yet studies put Bangladesh's potential annual zakat at Tk 20,000 to 25,000 crore, while the government zakat fund under the Islamic Foundation received Tk 10.21 crore in 2022-23.
Ibn al-sabil, the eighth category named in verse 60 of Surah at-Tawbah, means the traveller cut off from his own wealth and stranded. In the writer's view, the 1.2 million Rohingya in Cox's Bazar and the 4,955,000 people that an IOM survey found displaced by floods, cyclones and river erosion fit that definition. He recalls that Caliph Umar kept a store of flour, dates and water for destitute travellers, and that under Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz the category's money was allotted in proportion to the number of travellers on each road, which he likens to needs-based budgeting.
Most jurists of the four schools confine fi sabilillah to jihad and related work, but Rashid Rida, Mahmud Shaltut, Yusuf al-Qaradawi and others extended it to all welfare work, and the Islamic Fiqh Academy in Mecca brought education and research within it. The writer grants that objections over tamlik (transferring ownership to the recipient) and the limit of the categories are serious, so a wider reading needs strict accounting, allocation caps and a short list, such as higher education and technical training for poor students.
For reform, he proposes in the medium term a separate law and an autonomous zakat authority outside the revenue department, with scholars, accountants and citizens on its board. Private zakat bodies should be brought under common registration and reporting standards rather than closed, and in the long term a national Shariah board should issue a limited, verifiable list of acceptable spending under the two categories.
Globally, he notes, research cited by UNDP puts potential annual zakat at USD 200 billion to 1 trillion, while the UN's 2026 appeal for Rohingya aid is 26 percent smaller than last year's. His conclusion: the rules of zakat lack nothing; its management does.
Source: Amar Desh
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