Zakat al-Fitr

Zakat al-Fitr is the small obligatory charity given at the close of Ramadan, distinct from the yearly zakat on wealth. Where the greater zakat is calculated on accumulated property, the fitr charity is a fixed per-person amount, due on the head of the household on behalf of every member of the family including infants and dependents, and traditionally reckoned as a set measure of a staple food, dates, barley, wheat or the like, the saa of the classical sources, or its cash equivalent. Its modesty is deliberate: it is a duty that falls on nearly every Muslim, the poor as well as the comfortable, so that the whole community shares in the giving.

The tradition gives the charity two stated purposes: to purify the fast of the lapses and idle talk that may have marred it, and to ensure that the poor are not left without means to share in the joy of the festival that follows. It is on this second purpose that the timing turns.

Zakat al-Fitr must be given before the festival prayer of Eid al-Fitr on the morning that ends Ramadan, and the sources are emphatic that its value lies in reaching the poor in time for them to celebrate the festival rather than after. Given in its window it is accepted as the prescribed charity; given late it is reckoned an ordinary voluntary alms and the specific obligation is held to have been missed. In practice it is commonly paid a day or two early through the mosque so that distribution can be organised.

The recipients are the poor and needy, and the giving is on behalf of persons rather than on property, which makes it a leveller: a wealthy family and a struggling one owe the same amount per member. It is one of several parallel almsgiving duties in Islam alongside the wealth-zakat, the voluntary sadaqah, and, among Shia Muslims, the khums.

Reports transmitted through Ibn Umar date the obligation to the same period, the second year after the migration to Medina, in which the Ramadan fast itself was instituted, tying the two practices together from the tradition's earliest telling. Jurists have long disputed whether the charity must be given as a measure of staple food, such as dates, barley, or wheat, as most classical schools of the majority position hold, or whether its cash value may be given instead, a more flexible reading associated with the Hanafi school and increasingly followed in modern practice where mosques calculate and collect a monetary equivalent for administrative convenience.