‘Zakat’, the Wealth Tax in Islam

Zakat is one of the five pillars of the Islamic faith and is exercised along with prayer (‘salat’) as a mandatory Islamic devotional practice. This significantly demonstrates the principle of insuperability of ethico-economic matters from the devotional part of Islam. Why is this so? It is so because the structure of the ‘shuratic’ system develops into higher echelons of ethical perfection through progressively better comprehension of the ‘shariah’ and its effective deliberations in the ‘shuratic’ decision making process. This requires interpretation of the procedural content of the shariah’ that can be subjected to ‘ijtehad’ and ‘giyas’. But, more importantly, it requires the inculcation of ‘taqwa’ leading to a firmer grasp of the essence of ‘Tawhid’ that, as we have shown in Chapter 2, takes place functionally in the Islamic ethico-economic order. It is also important to note here that without this devotional approach, the ethical personality of the ‘shura’ cannot be perfected and consequently, the ‘shuratic’ process cannot be effective. This was shown in terms of the limiting values of the polity-market functional relations defined through Banach algebras in Chapter 2.