Foremost among them is the present dislocated political situation of the Muslims throughout the world. As long as the Dar-al-Islam remained a unified political reality the institution of zakat retained its integral role as part of the economic fabric of Muslim society. With the fall of the Khalifate, however, under the treacherous onslaught of Arab and Turkish constitutionalists and nationalists assisted and egged on by their kafir paymasters, and the subsequent dismemberment of the Muslim Ummah, the shari'a lost its central position in Muslim society and one of the major casualties of this was the institution of zakat.
The new post-colonial "Muslim" nation states were all founded upon kafir constitutions. All constitutions in the world are based on three universal pillars that preserve capitalism as the motor of the political and economic system. Those three pillars are:
1.Central Bank
2.Law of Legal Tender
3.National Debt
These three elements are alien to Islam and forbidden by the Sharia. The first one institutionalises the banks even in so-called Islamic constitutions. The existence of the Central Bank, which is the mother of riba institutions in every Muslim country guarantees the preservation in the law, of all other banks. The Law of Legal Tender, is against the fundamental principle of trade in the Shariah, that stands for “a an tarad dim minkum”, that is, [trading] with mutual consent. It is forbidden in Islam to impose any particular merchandise as a means of payment, even the Dinar. The fundamental principle that governs ALL commercial transactions is freedom to choose. Thus the present system of paper money which has no value other than by the compulsion of the State is in direct conflict with the fundamentals of freedom.
Legal Tender Law guarantees that the population is enslaved through inflation to a system of credit money dominated by the banks. The system also preserves the domination of foreign currencies in the international arena. And the Law of National Debt makes every citizen liable to the debt incurred by the State. This, needless to say, not only is forbidden because the debt carries riba, but as a principle making somebody else liable to someone else's debt has no basis in Islam.
This constitutional model has served to preserve capitalism as the ruling mechanism of our economic life. This inevitably denied zakat its vital fiscal status and turned it into the matter of private personal piety. But zakat is definitively a political matter not a private one. It is a matter of the public sphere not the private sphere. Its collection and distribution are a matter of Muslim governance not private charity. This cannot be overstated because not only has zakat now been removed from the public arena but nearly all the Muslims think that this is the way things should be. This is categorically not the case. Failure to grasp this has been a main contributory factor to the political weakness of the Muslims in the world today.
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