1. Objectives of zakah and its effects on the individual.

2. Objectives of zakah and its effects on society.

For a long time, many taxation specialists tried to widen the gap between taxes and social or humanistic issues, in order to prevent any adverse effect of such issues on the proceeds of taxes, claiming that taxes must have only one objective, bringing income to the treasury, and must otherwise be "neutral." It took deep social changes, several bloody revolutions, and great progression of ideas until financial experts came to realize that taxes can affect valuable socio-economic changes, can be used to reduce the economic differences among social classes, and can restore economic balance in society.

There has been no such upheaval in the history of zakah, for from the beginning, zakah, as one of the pillars of Islam, was an essential and sacred rite of worship.

Muslims pay it with devotion and sincerity, in accordance with the saying of the Prophet (p) "Deeds are [weighed] by intention, and each person will have [reward] according to his own intention,"1 and the verse "And they have been commanded no more than this:

to worship God, offering Him sincere devotion, being true [in faith], to establish regular prayer, and to practice zakah, and that is the religion right and straight."2

Zakah is first of all a practice in obedience to God and a self-purification meant to prepare the human being for eternal happiness in the hereafter. Once a person's heart is purified and soul is sanctified by the complete commitment to God's orders and obligations, such a person becomes worthy of the joy of the afterlife as one of "Those whose lives the angels take in a state of purity, saying 'Peace be upon you, enter ye the Garden, because of [the good] which ye did."3 It is this aspect of zakah that ties it to prayer in twenty-eight places of the Qur'an and tens of saying in Sunnah, in an unbreakable bond of association that makes it known as the sister of prayer. It is also this aspect of zakah that Abu Bakr had in mind when he declared war against those who refused to pay it, stating, "By God, I shall indeed fight those who separate prayer from zakah." Following this tradition, the books of fiqh place chapters on zakah immediately after chapters on prayer in the parts devoted to worships.

The obvious and essential objective of zakah as a worship is supplemented by moral, humanistic, social, and economic objectives which zakah is set to achieve by many verses and sayings. These objectives were fulfilled to various degrees when zakah was practiced in the early Muslim society; they concern the individual as wells as society, as will be studied in the following two chapters.