The Prophet Muḥammad and Ṣadaqa

Abstract

Today, ṣadaqa is commonly defined as voluntary alms, and zakāt as obligatory alms. However, their nature was totally different in the time of the prophet Muḥammad; zakāt was always a form of voluntary alms, while conversely, ṣadaqa in Muḥammad’s last years was a compulsory tax levied especially for the expenditure of jihād. Early Muslim scholars, particularly in Arabia and Iraq, had disliked the tax due to the central government and endeavoured for a long period to exclude from ṣadaqa the nature as a tax due. I will investigate below the process how ṣadaqa changed by nature in the early Islamic period.