Ṣadaqah

Ṣadaqah is the Arabic term for almsgiving, denoting in the Qurʼān and the sīra both the voluntary charity that the believer gives for the sake of God and, in many contexts, the obligatory alms levied upon wealth that was later systematized under the name zakāt. The word relates to the root meaning of sincerity and truthfulness; the giving of alms being held a proof (ṣidq) of the sincerity of faith. In the life of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ, ṣadaqah occupied a central place both as a constant exhortation to generosity and as an institution of the community at Madīnah, with appointed collectors and a defined disposition of its proceeds.

In its general and voluntary sense, ṣadaqah was urged by the Prophet ﷺ throughout his mission as among the noblest of deeds and a means of drawing near to God. The Qurʼān repeatedly joins the giving of alms to the establishment of prayer as a mark of the believer, and the ḥadīth preserve many sayings of the Prophet ﷺ upon the merit of charity: that ṣadaqah extinguishes sin as water extinguishes fire, that it does not diminish wealth, and that every act of kindness is a ṣadaqah, so that even a smile to one’s brother, or the removal of harm from the road, or a good word, was reckoned among its forms. In this breadth the term embraced not only the giving of money, but every benefit conferred for the sake of God.

Alongside this voluntary charity stood the obligatory ṣadaqah, the alms levied upon the wealth of those who possessed a certain minimum, which the Qurʼān names among the duties of the believers and whose recipients it specifies. After the establishment of the community at Madīnah, and especially in the later years, this obligatory alms was organized as a regular institution: it was levied upon herds of camels, cattle, and sheep, upon gold and silver, upon the produce of the fields, and upon merchandise, according to fixed measures, and was gathered by collectors whom the Prophet ﷺ appointed and sent out to the tribes and the regions.

The Prophet ﷺ dispatched these collectors (ʻummāl al-ṣadaqa or muṣaddiqūn) to the various peoples who had entered Islam, with written instructions setting out the rates to be taken upon the different kinds of property, and the sources preserve a number of these documents, such as the famous letter on the ṣadaqa of camels and flocks. When he sent Muʻādh ibn Jabal to Yemen, the Prophet ﷺ instructed him to teach its people that God had imposed upon them alms taken from their rich and rendered to their poor, a saying often cited as defining the purpose and the social character of the institution.

The disposition of the obligatory ṣadaqah was fixed by the Qurʼān, which named eight categories of recipients: the poor and the needy, those employed to collect it, those whose hearts were to be reconciled, the freeing of slaves, the relief of debtors, the way of God, and the wayfarer. The alms were thus a fund for the support of the poor and for the common purposes of the community, distinct from the spoils of war and from the fayʼ. The Prophet ﷺ applied the proceeds to these ends, and the administration of the ṣadaqa became one of the regular functions of the community and, after him, of the caliphate, its collection and distribution forming a principal concern of the early state.

A distinctive ruling attached to the ṣadaqah in relation to the Prophet ﷺ and his family: the obligatory alms were forbidden to him and to the people of his house, the Banū Hāshim and, by the prevailing view, the Banū al-Muṭṭalib. The Prophet ﷺ declared that ṣadaqah was not lawful for the family of Muḥammad, for it was “the dirt of the people,” the cleansing of their wealth, and so not befitting those whom God had purified; in its stead a portion of the spoils, the khums, was appointed for the kindred of the Prophet ﷺ. The well-known incident in which his grandson al-Ḥasan, as a child, took a date from the alms and the Prophet ﷺ made him cast it out of his mouth is preserved as an illustration of this prohibition.

The distinction between the voluntary ṣadaqah and the obligatory alms was not always sharply drawn in the language of the early sources, where the single word ṣadaqah served for both, and the technical separation of zakāt as the name of the obligatory due from ṣadaqah as the general term for charity developed gradually in the literature of the law. The jurists came to treat the obligatory ṣadaqah, or zakāt, as one of the pillars of Islam, defining its thresholds, rates, and recipients in detail, while the voluntary ṣadaqah remained a recommended act of devotion of the widest scope, unbounded by measure or season.

In the sīra tradition, ṣadaqah is remembered as both the constant counsel of the Prophet ﷺ to generosity and mercy, and the institution by which the wealth of the community was made to serve its poor: an alms taken from the rich and given to the needy, gathered by appointed collectors, disposed among the categories the Qurʼān had named, and forbidden to the family of the Prophet ﷺ as a mark of their purity. In the union of its voluntary and its obligatory senses, ṣadaqah stands in the life of the Prophet ﷺ as a foundation of the social order of Islam and a measure of the sincerity of faith that its very name proclaims.