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EDITORIAL: The sad story of Zakat

The Punjab minister for Zakat and Ushr,
Mian Khadim Hussain Wattoo, has stated in the Punjab Assembly that around 150 cases came to the government’s notice during 2003-4 in which various chairmen of Zakat committees distributed Zakat funds among their relatives. The money thus embezzled had exceeded Rs 7 million. He said 88 cases had been registered but only two men accused of hanky-panky had been arrested and a mere Rs 88,000 recovered. Some time back, a similar round of embezzlement of Zakat funds took place in Sindh, leading to a loss of Rs 40 million.

Exploiting Islam in everyday life is rife but what we have done with the Quranic taxation of Zakat is unforgivable. The clergy obliged first by being literalist and hidebound about the uses to which Zakat could be put. That resulted in the state getting scared and deciding that money collected as Zakat had to be distributed among the needy rather than being spent on building something for the employment, education and livelihood of the poor. Thus scores of billions of rupees deducted from the savings accounts of unwilling depositors and institutions were lost every year because the Zakat committees (running into thousands) ate up the collection at the district level. Then the government, overwhelmed by corruption, stopped distribution for three years in the 1990s, but the collection never stopped and there was a Zakat mountain to disburse in 1999. Meanwhile the Supreme Court took pity on the Sunni Muslims and made the deduction voluntary as in the case of the Shias.

This notion of Zakat was rotten from the start. A sympathetic scholar, who has studied the system, comes to the conclusion that religious laws tend to remain unopposed and un-amended even when their enforcement requires amendment because the clergy is unwilling to change the status quo. In this case, the working of the Central Zakat Administration, responsible for Zakat and Ushr, has never been as transparent as required. There is a tendency to withhold the real statistics of collection and disbursement on the basis of some religious edict or the other. (A federal officer absconded to London with a billion rupees of Zakat money and it couldn’t even be disclosed). None of the “objectives” laid out in the Zakat and Ushr Ordinance 1980, like elimination of poverty and beggary, and the creation of a welfare state, were achieved, although up to three percent poverty alleviation could have been achieved in a country where 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.

The 1995 decision to ‘federalise’ Zakat funds and stop disbursements for three years was based on the general perception that the system was shot through with corruption. The government dishonestly used the accumulated sum for other mundane purposes. Indeed, from 1995 until 1999, the governments of Pakistan used Zakat money to help solve their liquidity crisis and to help pay for “other priorities” of patronage and power. The situation acquired farcical dimensions when the deduction of Zakat compelled many Sunnis to declare themselves Shias so that their accounts wouldn’t be taxed. The Shias don’t pay because of the edict that “only a legitimate successor to Muhammad (peace be upon him) can collect Zakat”. Although Syed Sunnis pay Zakat they are not qualified to receive it on the basis of a hadith. The non-payment under affidavits of faith was so widespread that the Supreme Court of Pakistan stepped in and made exemption possible for the Sunnis also.

Under General Musharraf, the religion minister Dr Mahmud Ghazi took upon himself the role of reforming and improving the Zakat and Ushr system. Fifteen billion rupees had accumulated over the past years because of non-disbursement, one year normally yielding four billion rupees. He could increase the monthly payments to deserving individuals and even create small jobs for them as he declared in a TV interview. He wanted to carry out ijtihad to increase the rate of Ushr (this could mean imposing a 10 percent levy on irrigated lands) and then replace the planned agricultural tax with it. But nothing came from his efforts and he was made the butt of unseemly jokes from the clerical community that was now baying for General Musharraf’s blood because of his perceived Kemalist outlook. For all these reasons Zakat today continues to be the biggest sin of Pakistan as a religious community.

We all know that Zakat committees, like the local bodies, are nurseries where corrupt politicians in power bring up their future heirs. If there are lessons to learn about corruption one simply has to look at what the national press wrote about the dirt that flew out of the ruling party’s internecine struggle during the last local bodies’ elections to get the juicy bits to suck at from offices meant for the people’s welfare. Zakat committees are a part of this evil spoils system. This is where the first lessons of embezzlement are learnt. Later on, thanks to Zakat, we get corrupt politicians who dishonour each other through Ehtesab Bureaus. But even if we were to turn honest overnight, the interpretation we have placed on how Zakat is to be distributed will reduce the project of looking after the poor to a nullity. As things stand, disbursements can only be made to individuals and, funnily, to madrassas on the basis of a list of individual seminarians.

Hospitals are enabled to look after the poor and collect the cost from the Zakat Fund, but if a Pakistani national is not a Muslim he can’t be helped. This is how Zakat actually declassifies a full constitutional citizen of Pakistan to a lower status. And if you have fallen on bad times and you happen to be a Syed, you can’t get Zakat, while the chairman of the Zakat committee can gorge on it and hand it around to his relatives too. This is a sad story but there is nothing we Muslims can do about it unless we wake up from the unrealistic dreams of our clerics who want to dominate the world with their backward notions of governance. *

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