356 chapter nine
Zakàh and taxation
Abolition of ribà
Interest-free banking
Monetary policies, fiscal policy and resource allocation
Islamic economics theory, ethics and economics
Consumer behaviour
Insurance
Economic cooperation among Muslim countries
Indexation
Economic developmentZakàh and Taxation
Whenever Zakàh is mentioned in a bibliographical list, or sought as
an entry in the literature, a reference book comes always to mind,
that is “fiqh al-Zakàh” ( jurisprudence of Zakàh) by the jurist Yùsùf
al-Qardawi. The book, which has been translated from Arabic, its
original language, to many other languages including English, has
been republished several times, and is still universally demanded. In
two volumes the book provides an encyclopedia of the third pillar
of Islam. Al-Qardawi seems to have exhausted the coverage of the
subject by looking into it from the perspective of the four main
schools of Islamic thought, concluding with his own opinion. The
purpose of the book was threefold: first, to educate Muslims on their
religious obligations as far as Zakàh is concerned, second, to adapt
the application of Zakàh to the twentieth century’s society given the
complexities of estimating the Zakàh tax base, and third, to stress
the merit of Zakàh as a societal caring tax on the one hand and an
investment incentive levy on the other.
The reasons for writing on Zakàh in the twentieth century are
several, as al-Qardawi is telling us in his preface to the first 1969
edition of his fiqhbook, which is repeated in the edition of 1981,
(Al-Qardawi, 1981):
(1) The importance of the subject per se as the third pillar of the
five pillars of Islam, on the one hand, and the corner stone of
an Islamic economics approach on the other, and the need to
rewrite the subject in a manner that suits modern times as com-
pared with the works of classical jurists. The rewriting is par-
ticularly needed given the difference of opinions between the