{"id":1209,"date":"2022-05-04T09:24:27","date_gmt":"2022-05-04T09:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.asadullahyate.com\/wordpress\/?p=1209"},"modified":"2022-05-09T10:55:38","modified_gmt":"2022-05-09T10:55:38","slug":"al-fatr-the-crack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.asadullahyate.com\/wordpress\/?p=1209","title":{"rendered":"Al-Fatr, The Crack"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The verb \u0641\u0637\u0631, fatara<\/em>, means to cleave, to split and by extension to find out or begin anything; and it also refers to Allah’s act of creation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among its associated meanings is the qur’anic term fitra<\/em>, 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<\/em> are no longer adhered too; among them too is the iftaar<\/em>, 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 fateer<\/em>a which refers to the dough which bursts into life when baked; among them too the futr<\/em>, the fungi which suddenly breaks open the earth to appear after the rains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The zakat al-fitr<\/em>, ‘the purification of al-fitr’, refers to the giving of basic foodstuffs given after Ramadan in recognition of the fitr<\/em>, the breaking of the fast and is an act which issues from the fitra<\/em>, the natural disposition of a man or woman, in order to purify.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as Imam Malik’s judgement is that the zakat of wealth is to be distributed among the local<\/em> people, so too is his judgement regarding the zakat al-fitr<\/em>: 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<\/em>. 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<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em>: 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.\u00a0Allah 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 <\/em>knowledge must be acquired directly from someone who acquired his knowledge directly from a real person,<\/em> 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The verb \u0641\u0637\u0631, 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asadullahyate.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asadullahyate.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asadullahyate.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asadullahyate.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asadullahyate.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1209"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.asadullahyate.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1220,"href":"http:\/\/www.asadullahyate.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209\/revisions\/1220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asadullahyate.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asadullahyate.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asadullahyate.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}