Khums

Khums, “the fifth,” is the portion of one-fifth set apart from the spoils of war and assigned by the Qurʼān to specified recipients, the remaining four-fifths going to the warriors who took the spoils. Established by the verse of Sūrat al-Anfāl revealed after the Battle of Badr, the khums was the share reserved for God and the Messenger ﷺ and the purposes named alongside them, and its collection and disposition became one of the fixed institutions of the early community. The rule belongs to the sīrah of the Madīnan period, when the Muslims first took spoils in their campaigns, and it furnished the law with the foundation of its doctrine concerning the division of ghanīmah.

The Qurʼānic basis of the khums is the verse declaring that whatever the believers take as spoils, a fifth of it belongs to God and to the Messenger ﷺ, and to the near of kin, the orphans, the needy, and the wayfarer. Upon this verse the law built its rule that the spoils of battle (ghanīmah) are divided into five parts: four parts are distributed among the warriors who fought, the horseman receiving a larger share than the man on foot, and the fifth part is set aside for the categories named in the verse. The Prophet ﷺ applied this division in the campaigns after Badr, and the Companions transmitted the manner of it.

The recipients of the khums named in the verse were understood somewhat differently by the schools of law. The share of God and the Messenger ﷺ was, in the lifetime of the Prophet ﷺ, at his disposal for the common good and the affairs of the community and the equipping of the warriors; the share of the near of kin (dhawī al-qurbá) was given to the kindred of the Prophet ﷺ, the Banū Hāshim and, by the prevailing view, the Banū al-Muṭṭalib, in compensation for their being forbidden the ṣadaqah; and the shares of the orphans, the needy, and the wayfarer were applied to their relief. After the death of the Prophet ﷺ the disposition of his share and that of his kindred became a matter of discussion among the jurists and the schools.

The question of the khums and the kindred of the Prophet ﷺ was bound up with the prohibition of the ṣadaqah, the alms, to the family of the Prophet ﷺ, for the ṣadaqah was “the dirt of the people” and not befitting them; in its place the khums, an honourable portion, was appointed for them. The Sunni schools differed as to whether the share of the kindred continued after the Prophet ﷺ and to whom it then fell, some holding that it lapsed or reverted to the general interests of the Muslims; the Shia tradition, by contrast, retained the khums as a standing obligation of the believers, due not only upon the spoils of war but upon other categories of gain, and reserved a portion of it for the descendants of the Prophet ﷺ and for the imam, giving the institution a far larger place in their law than it held among the Sunnis.

Closely connected with the khums was the matter of the anfāl, the additional grants that the Prophet ﷺ might make from the spoils, and of the ṣafiyy, the portion he chose for himself before the division, both of which are treated in the early sources alongside the fifth. The detailed rules of all these—the division of the spoils, the shares of horse and man, the khums and its recipients, the grants and the chosen portion—were elaborated by the jurists from the practice of the Prophet ﷺ and the reports of the Companions, and they formed an important chapter of the law of jihād and of the public revenue.

In the sīrah tradition, the khums is remembered as the fifth of the spoils that the Qurʼān set apart, after Badr, for God and the Messenger ﷺ and the kindred and the poor: the honourable portion appointed for the family of the Prophet ﷺ in place of the alms forbidden them, and a share devoted to the orphans, the needy, and the wayfarer. Grounded in Sūrat al-Anfāl and in the practice of the Prophet ﷺ upon his campaigns, it passed into the law as a fixed institution of the division of ghanīmah and a head of the revenue of the community, understood and applied with some difference among the schools, but in its origin one of the ordinances revealed to the Prophet ﷺ in the years of the early warfare.

## References

1 Abū ʻAbd Allāh al-Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, “Kitāb farḍ al-khums,” nos. 3091–3140. 2 Abū al-Ḥusayn Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, “Kitāb al-jihād wa-al-siyar,” bāb al-anfāl, nos. 1750–56. 3 Abū ʻUbayd al-Qāsim ibn Sallām, Kitāb al-amwāl (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1988), 325–50. 4 Abū Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn Ibrāhīm, Kitāb al-kharāj (Beirut: Dār al-Maʻrifa, 1979), 18–23. 5 Ibn Qudāma, al-Mughnī (Cairo: Maktabat al-Qāhira, 1968), 9:282–87.6 al-Ṭūsī, al-Nihāya fī mujarrad al-fiqh wa-al-fatāwá (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʻArabī, 1980), 196–200.7 Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra al-nabawiyya, trans. Alfred Guillaume as The Life of Muhammad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 321–27. 8 E. Løkkegaard, “Khums,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1986), 5:18–19.