Between God, the People, and the State: Citizen Conceptions of Zakat
Share
HomePublicationsBetween God, the People, and the State: Citizen Co…
Research in Brief 94
Zakat – one of the five pillars of Islam – is an annual obligatory payment, typically equivalent to 2.5 per cent of an individual’s productive wealth, to a set of appropriate recipients, including the poor. The annual global zakat pool is estimated to make up between US$200 billion and 1 trillion. States have long sought to harness zakat for their own budgets – and legitimacy. To date, however, there has been no systematic empirical discussion of how citizens perceive and engage with state involvement in zakat and how they perceive state-run zakat funds. These perceptions and experiences are central to important questions of how we conceptualise fiscal transfers and the relationship between citizens and states: if zakat is legally treated as a tax, does it function like one too? Do citizens engage with it differently? Does its formalisation strengthen or undermine the social norms in which it is embedded? Summary of Working Paper 167.
Max Gallien is a Research Fellow at the ICTD. His research specialises in the politics of informal and illegal economies, the political economy of the Middle East and North Africa and development politics. He completed his PhD at the London School of Economics. Max co-leads the informality and taxation programme with Vanessa, as well as the ICTD’s capacity building programme.
Dr. Umair Javed is an Assistant Professor at the Mushtaq Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He completed his PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2018, where he was a recipient of the LSE Centennial PhD Studentship.
His doctoral research focused on politics and practices of accumulation, and labour relations in Pakistan's informal economy, with a specific focus on the retail-wholesale (bazaar) sector. More broadly, his research interests span various aspects of political participation, socio-economic development, and urban public life in South Asia.
Vanessa van den Boogaard is a Research Fellow at the ICTD and a Senior Research Associate at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She completed her PhD thesis on informal revenue generation and statebuilding in Sierra Leone, and has ongoing research on the topic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia. Vanessa leads the ICTD’s new programme on civil society engagement in tax reform and co-leads the research programme on informal taxation.
Citation: Gallien, M.; Javed, U. and van den Boogaard, V. (2023) Between God, the People, and the State: Citizen Conceptions of Zakat, ICTD Research in Brief 94, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, DOI: 10.19088/ICTD.2023.041
