The verb فطر, fatara, means to cleave, to split and by extension to find out or begin anything; and it also refers to Allah’s act of creation.
Among its associated meanings is the qur’anic term fitra, the natural, healthy, balanced state on which Allah has created mankind – but which is subject to unnaturalness, sickness and imbalance when the parameters and rules of the Author of this fitra are no longer adhered too; among them too is the iftaar, the breaking of the fast, the splitting, cleaving or discrimination between eating and not-eating, between drinking and not drinking and between sexual activity and refraining from it; among them too the fateera which refers to the dough which bursts into life when baked; among them too the futr, the fungi which suddenly breaks open the earth to appear after the rains.
The zakat al-fitr, ‘the purification of al-fitr’, refers to the giving of basic foodstuffs given after Ramadan in recognition of the fitr, the breaking of the fast and is an act which issues from the fitra, the natural disposition of a man or woman, in order to purify.
Just as Imam Malik’s judgement is that the zakat of wealth is to be distributed among the local people, so too is his judgement regarding the zakat al-fitr: sending an electronic message thousands of kilometres to the land of one’s parents or forefathers via the third-party, numerical, payment system is not the same – and certainly illegal under normal circumstances – as the sultan’s representative handing over actual edibles personally, face to face, to people in the community. As the fuqaha – and those who are in need of reasons, have explained: the here and now , the existential, is the nub, the crux, of the matter – better to strengthen and affirm those around one than conceptually help the far and distant; this in turn aids those who have migrated or fled their homelands to become resident, to realize that Allah in fact has brought them to their new home and that they may well die parted from their ancestral birthplace; then in turn it shall become easier for them to fathom why the phenomenon of islamic charities is more often than not counterproductive: the people in fact who are most in need of help are the muminun from the so-called rich countries; the people who are least in need of help are the muminun from the so-called poor countries who in fact are negatively impacted by most of the charity products and often encouraged to abandon their local farmlands and become dependent on ‘white’, processed foodstuffs.
Moreover the electronic transmission of numbers to pay for zakat deprives the person paying of the dua which the collector makes for him in his presence: as Allah taala has said: ‘Take zakat from their wealth to purify and cleanse them and pray for them. Your prayers bring relief to them. Allah is All-Hearing, All-Knowing’; to argue that those in far off lands may also pray for such a person is theoretically correct, but beside the point: just as real knowledge must be acquired directly from someone who acquired his knowledge directly from a real person, so the zakat-connection by internet of two persons who probably do not even know each other is not of the same rank as the meeting of two persons face to face.