ISLAM AND THE WEST - 40

 I wasn’t planning to write this post as it gets into the realm of Fiqh (Islamic Jurisprudence) and I am no religious scholar. Also, nd there are different ways of calculating whether one needs to pay Zakat, all of which are correct as long as one follows an authentic scholar. But then I remembered a question by my eldest daughter some months ago. Some time ago we had opened savings accounts for our 3 children and started putting some money into them every month. Earlier this year my eldest daughter asked me, “Daddy, do I need to pay Zakat?” To my utmost embarrassment I had never thought about the question she asked me.

 

In Shariah, the bar for becoming Sahib-e-Nisab (a person whose assets beside items of regular use are above a certain threshold over which he needs to pay Zakat) is 7.5 tawla (a traditional weight measure) of gold or 52 tawla of silver. We calculated that as 1 tawla = 11.6 grams approx. and price of 1 gram of silver in NZ is $1.15, therefore, Nisab (threshold for becoming liable to pay Zakat) in NZ would be having about cash or assets other than items of daily use like clothes, car or house, over about $700 for more than one year. So my daughter needed to give 2.5 % of her savings in charity as Zakat. The other relevant point is that once someone becomes Sahib-e-Nisab, they also become liable to do Qurbani (slaughter) at the time of Hajj.

 

I thought I will share just so that there may be other parents or young people who may not have thought about whether their children or themselves have become liable to give Zakat.