Blindspot!
Our Needy People
When the Prophet (peace be upon him) sent an envoy to a tribe
that had converted to Islam, he asked the envoy to teach them the five
pillars of Islam. Speaking about zakat, he told him to
explain to them that it had to be deducted from the money of the rich
among them and distributed to “their needy people” (‘ala fuqara’ihim). The scholars, in all the schools of law and through the ages have, thus, always insisted on the necessity of spending the zakat
locally first, for the poor and the needy people of the place, the
locality or the society within which it has been collected. It
is only when the local needs have been satisfied, or in exceptional
situations such as natural catastrophes or wars etc., that the spending
of zakat abroad can be done.
Not only does the zakat shape the social conscience of the
Muslim but it also directs him/her towards his/her immediate
environment in order to build this conscience by facing up to the
difficulties and dysfunctions of his/her society, its poor or/and
marginalised people. Zakat, unlike the voluntary alms (sadaqa)
is first intended for the Muslims and our faithfulness to its teaching
demands of us to observe what is going on around us, within our
nearest spiritual community. This "priority to proximity" is
fundamental: it imposes a requirement to know one’s society, to care
about the state of the Muslims in one’s area, town and country.
We are very far from living up
to this teaching today. In the majority of the Western societies, in
the United States, in Canada, in Britain, in France as in Australia,
one finds women and men who give zakat to charitable
organisations in the Third World or to their countries of origin. They
care very little about the situation of those who live near them and
they are convinced they are doing right since those from "over there"
are poorer than those from "around here". The mistake consists in forgetting that the poor from around here have rights (haqun ma’lum) over the rich from around here. Nothing prevents the latter from sending voluntary alms (sadaqat)
to the deprived people of the entire world or to their countries of
origin but they have an established duty, from which they cannot
escape, towards the needy people of their country of residence: once
again it is, before God, the rights of "their poor people".
One can but be sad, and sometimes disgusted, when observing how the Muslims care so little about the local realities: obsessed
by the international scene and the situation of the Muslims "from
over there", they no longer see the reality of the education’s deficit,
unemployment, social marginalisation, drugs, violence and prisons in
their own society. Though the awareness of their brothers’
misfortune elsewhere is positive, per se, it has had the very negative
consequence of making them very passive, neglectful and unaware of the
appalling situation of brothers at their own doorsteps. This is a
tragedy, an error and, in fact, a betrayal of the fundamental teaching
of zakat.
The Muslim organisations have a great deal of responsibility in
this failure since they have difficulty proposing programmes and
priorities for the zakat's collection and distribution at the local level, in the towns and the regions. A correct understanding of this dimension of zakat
would shape the individual’s spiritual and his/her citizen's
conscience with which one understands that one has to be involved in
one’s environment. This means one has to study it and to find
the best, fairest and most coherent means to spend the purifying social
tax in one’s own society, in Britain, France, the United States, Canada, Australia or elsewhere.
Compiled From:
"One day, our poor people will ask" – Tariq Ramadan |
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