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Islamic scholars and professionals meet to discuss role of collective zakat fund for education and self-employment

“Zakat is usually distributed in pieces which is not the correct way to bring the change. Instead, Zakat must be used as a tool to transform one zakat taker into zakat giver.”

By Altamash Ansari for TwoCircles.net

New Delhi: The Association of Muslim Professionals (AMP) and Limra Foundation came together on Sunday by organizing a high-level intellectual discussion on utilization of Zakat for empowering lives of less fortunate and needy people.

The discussion was held at Shaheen Bagh, which is a densely populated Muslim neighbourhood in New Delhi, where Islamic scholars, social activists, professionals and those from academic fields were invited for the scholarly discussions to not only understand the nuances of ‘Zakat’ but also to discuss the effective utilization of this mighty tool for our socio-economic development, sustainable poverty alleviation and community upliftment.

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Islamic Scholar Mufti Zafaruddin Barkati spoke about the nuances of Zakat and its various criteria and importance as per Sharia teachings. He said that if every capable/eligible person takes out Zakat sincerely then there would not be a single community member who would go hungry a single day. He further said that Islam has taught us to spread goodness not just within the Community but work for the entire society’s benefit and the whole humanity.

It would be noteworthy that AMP had initiated its ‘Zakat Fund’ two years ago with a Zakat collection of Rs two lakh, the corpus of which had jumped four fold to around Rs eight lakh in the subsequent years. This year, the organization aims to collect Rs 25 lakh in Zakat Fund and utilize it towards education and employment generation opportunities.

Ruhul Islam from AMP said that ‘Zakat’ is not only a tool for fair wealth distribution and reigning in social imbalance but if utilized aptly it can turn out to be a very powerful source for poverty alleviation and welfare of the community. He further pointed out the problems of Zakat system and told that people are not completely aware about Zakat systems and calculations and there is a huge need of creating awareness in masses for giving complete zakat.

Altamash Mohammed, Delhi Coordinator of AMP, stressed on the fact that Zakat is usually distributed in pieces which is not the correct way to bring the change. “Instead, Zakat must be used as a tool to transform one zakat taker into zakat giver,” he said.

Speaking on AMP’s efforts in this regards on telephone, AMP president Aamir Edresy said that AMPs main focus has always been towards ‘Education and Employment’ and as per our policy, we have focused on two main purposes for disbursement of funds. 1) To support Higher Education; and 2) To create avenues of Self Employment. He also emphasized that, probably the Zakat Fund of AMP is the only fund where no administration cost is taken from zakat money and 100% of fund is disbursed to the needy and poor people.

Aqleem Raza Misbahi, chairman of Limra Foundation, said that “rather than donating cash to people, we must encourage people to utilize the Zakat money for self-sustainable development. As the famous proverb goes, ‘Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, Teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime’. He suggested that “we should prefer to utilize the Zakat money to create means of livelihood for the needy such as putting up a mobile repair shop, buy or repair an auto rickshaw, help someone in their professional studies rather than just giving the money for routine expenses.”

The discussion ended with a resolve by all the participants and audiences to earnestly adhere to this important tenet of Islam and work sincerely towards community development, national peace and progress.

It was also decided that the “AMP and all other organizations should establish a system whose mission will be transforming the beneficiaries of today to the benefactors of tomorrow.”