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I looked it up, zakat is not charity, it is more like a tax that every muslim has to pay to help their communities, but there are some imams that actually believe in giving some of the zakat money to non-muslims in extreme poverty, and also as a means to "encourage" non-muslims to convert.
Actual charity is called "sadaqah" and there are no restrictions on it.
That's obscuring reality. Zakat is a pillar of islam, an obligatory duty. Sadakat as you present it, in its non-discriminatory form, is a modern apologist concept no one cares about (nor should they, since it’s optional). In the coran when sadakat comes up, it means zakat. All muslim charities are 99% concentrated on helping muslims, when they’re not building mosques and supporting terrorism.
@OliveTapenade
I’ll just quote this fatwa:
When it ‘overflows’ and benefits everyone as you say, it is not an acceptable beneficiary of islamic charity.
You made a general claim, though, that Muslims will never be - and are in fact forbidden to be - charitable towards non-Muslims. That's not the case. On the doctrinal or dogmatic level, sadaqah is permitted and indeed considered praiseworthy, and sadaqah can be directed towards anybody.
There are some rules about zakat, yes, though depending on the specific Islamic community those rules may be interpreted in different ways, or more or less stringently. One fatwa rarely proves very much, because a fatwa is just an opinion by a scholar, and scholars regularly disagree. Even in this case, the objection to giving zakat to a hospital in a generic sense is that the Qur'an lists the proper recipients of zakat, and hospitals aren't among them. (The needy are, but obviously you can't assume that any given hospital is needy - there are wealthy hospitals and wealthy patients.) The website you've linked says:
Obviously Muslims are not forbidden to build mosques, repair roads, or build libraries. (Who else would build a mosque, anyway?) They're just not to use the zakat funds for that, because zakat is earmarked for something else.
Now I take it your objection is to zakat being earmarked for Muslims specifically.
The first thing to say is that the linked page explicitly allows non-Muslims to benefit from zakat funds in some circumstances (for instance, it mentions using zakat to buy and free even a non-Muslim slave, especially if there is hope he may become Muslim; or paying zakat to "an evil man... so as to ward off his evil from the Muslims"). However, it is in general true that the point of zakat is the aid and succour of the Islamic community.
It is... unclear to me why that it is immediately forbidden. The money in the church collection plate will be used to benefit the church. If you donate money to a Buddhist temple or to a synagogue, you may reasonably assume it will be used for Buddhist or Jewish causes.
Zakat is not the sum total of Islamic charity, so I guess I don't find it obvious evidence of the evil or perfidy of Islam that Muslims donate a certain amount of money to help other Muslims.
Now, it might be true that, structurally as it were, Islam is less inclined to donate money or labour for the humanitarian benefit of non-Muslims. That's the sort of thing that I plausibly expect would differ between religions - for instance, Christianity and Buddhism both have strong, explicit ethics of universal beneficence and are involved in global aid societies, whereas not all religions might be like that. I'm not immediately aware of any good comparative figures on charitable giving by religion; I suspect it might be confounded a lot by firstly religious people who give to secular causes and don't record their religious motivation, and secondly the fact that different religions are not evenly distributed socio-economically, so religions that tend to have wealthier adherents might show up as more generous. But I'll have a look around later today and see if I can find anything.
The first result Google gave me suggests that in the US, Jews are the most charitable, followed by Protestants, and then Muslims and Catholics are neck-and-neck for the third, and it suggests that Jews and Muslims tend to favour secular organisations, while Christians favour religious organisations. But I imagine that is heavily confounded as well (if nothing else Christian charities are much more common and comprehensive in the US). This page is unsourced but suggests that Christians are the most generous, followed by Sikhs and Muslims, but offers no source. More searching to come.
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This is correct - zakat is more like a tithe in that it's a mandatory payment that's supposed to go to the wider Islamic community. It is therefore usually only spent on causes that benefit the Islamic community, though if you look at uses of zakat in practice, it is often spent in ways that 'overflow' and benefit everyone (e.g. public health or infrastructure in majority-Muslim communities).
Non-obligatory charity, or sadaqah, is considered highly meritorious and may be used for any righteous purpose, including aid to non-Muslims.
I think it helps to put this into a historical context, where zakat is basically Islamic taxes. It would be paid to the caliphate, which is to say, to the state, which then uses it for causes of benefit to the entire state. Historically, this was a confessional, Islamic organisation, because the historical, pre-modern mode of Islamic governance is either theocratic, or at least a confessional monarchy of some kind. At present this model is a bit muddled because there is no caliphate, so in practice Muslims pay taxes twice, once to the state and once to the ummah, and the latter are used by various Islamic NGOs. This is definitely an awkward situation and there's no doubt need for some critical conversations within Islam about the role of zakat in a secular state. However, this:
is simply false. Zakat is not the extent of Islamic charity.
There is a lot of Islamic giving that is preferentially directed towards Muslims, naturally, but then, I doubt you'll have much trouble finding church aid services that are directed particularly towards Christians, or similar. It is, at any rate, not Islamic dogma that no charity may be offered towards non-Muslims.
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