Kaleem Ahmid.
Previously an Entrepreneur in Residence at EV, Community Builder at Northeastern and in Boston, a Visiting Scholar at JHU Center for Health Security, and EAGxBoston 2022 and EAGxNYC 2023 organiser.
Kaleem
Karma: 2,401
I don’t know what price or % of daily income would be unaffordable, but I think it would be very useful to know what that was so that I could use the number in a question to a theological authority.
I assume the standard that would be more widely useful would be “not available in local markets at any price”.
yeah it answers the question—although I think for the purposes of leaning on this answer I’d probably want someone/something with reputation on the subject (no offence intended).
The point I’m trying to clarify is whether or not funding e.g. AMF means that people are getting something which they couldn’t get otherwise. I don’t think the idea that they might not choose to purchase them even if they’re available is necessarily good enough in this instance.
The reason behind the question is to see whether or not I can apply the reasoning behind the ruling that “yes you can give zakat to a charity which provides free organ transplants to people who can’t afford them” to something like AMF.
[Question] ITBN availability
Wow, this is amazing news. Thank you so much for all the hard work that must have gone into writing this book, I can’t wait to read it !
(Small, very reluctant point of correction: I think unfortunately, “The good it promises, the harm it does” is probably the first book focusing on EA and FAW (assuming we don’t consider Animal Liberation to be a book about EA, which I think is fair)).
thanks for this—I think I get it now. I think the points relating to the effects on zakat-donors and non-zakat donors are good ones, especially since I hadn’t considered the effect on non-zakat donors a huge amount up until now.
With regards to Zakat donors: I don’t think the majority of muslim donors would find this argument a reason not to donate. The thing they care most about is whether or not the entire amount of zakat they donate is reaching the hands of zakat-eligible recipients. There is a large amount of scholarship around the philosophy of zakat, and group/societal upliftment is the primary non-spiritual goal. So I don’t think the idea that there are spillover effects which benefit non-muslims would be an issue for most donors, since there is a general expectation that people who are not eligible recipients (e.g. Muslims who aren’t poor) will experience positive effects too.
With regards to maximization-oriented non-zakat donors: I’m not sure about this. I think in the scenario where GD somehow ignore the (hopefully massive) new restricted pool of funds, then yeah maybe this means that donating to GD stops being an extremely cost-effective thing to do. But I think the group of people who care very much about this either 1) don’t donate to GD already, since we seem to have many much more cost-effective options available and 2) would be fine with that because it’d be a result of an influx of donations which are contingent on the new program and are counterfactually significant when thinking about “all the money given to effective causes”.
But … It seems unlikely that GD would react that way to this type of influx in restricted funding? Given that the realistic way which this would happen would be that GD set up a new muslim country-specific program (e.g in Bangladesh or Afghanistan), I’d expect unrestricted funds to be used in the same way they’re currently being used with respects to the various programs they already run? Maybe I’m still missing something you’re pointing out here.
I think your point about new org vs GD benefits are right, but maybe also overlook many of the reasons why GD would be an appealing option to muslim donors (low admin cost and transaction costs, high transparency and accountability, track record) whereas setting up a new org means that these things aren’t there immediately and might never be there to the same degree
Hi—good questions, and things I’ve been trying hard to find out.
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I think most scholars would say this is dubious but maybe acceptable depending on what the context is. I’ve come across mixed reactions when I’ve explained NI’s model
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Its unideal and pretty uncommon—the vast majority of zakat is cash, and in rare cases its emergency supplies like food, water, and medical supplies in disaster regions.
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I haven’t asked this question specifically to anybody (because I hadn’t really considered it as an option) but my intuition from all the other discussions about recipient eligibility would lead me to think that this would generally not be certified as zakat-compliant by a mainstream org.
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Yarrow, there is a MASSIVE amount of writing on this topic—there is quite a lot of agreement but also (like many things in Islam) large points of disagreement.
I think for the purposes of EA/effective giving, in the simplest form:
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Zakat is a wealth-tax levied against Muslims above a certain wealth level and given to a small prescribed group of eligible recipients. Strictly, zakat has to be in the form of the transfer of ownership of cash or commodities.
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In the theology there are 8 permissible groups, only one of which I think we’d be able to target for EA purposes—the (Muslim) poor and needy. So any program we’d try and get to be zakat-certified would be checked that the recipients are muslim and are poor and a couple of other things. They’d also want to make sure that the funds are disbursed within one lunar year of collection.
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Zakat has to be held in a non-interest-barring account, and shouldn’t be intermingled with non-Zakat funds. Zakat also can’t be used to cover transaction or operational fees.
Let me know if you have any other more specific points of enquiry?
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Thanks Ian.
I agree with the three bullet points—using unrestricted or dedicated non-zakat donations to cover operating costs is likely the best way to do this. Additionally:
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Determining who is Muslim is a non-trivial and probably impossible thing to do, which is why I would probably just punt that to whichever external orgs we approach to get the program zakat- certified. They’re likely just going to do what they did when they zakat certified GD’s Yemen program, which is to look at the national or regional demographic data, as you suggested. This also prevents GD from having to ask recipients if they’re muslim or not, which I think would be a bad look for them and probably not be good for their overall trustworthiness amongst donors and non-muslim potential receipts in the future.
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You can’t do the after-the-fact or USAID alcohol approach because zakat has to be paid directly to muslim recipients—it’s not got anything to do with whether or not the money is used to pay for halaal/haraam things.
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Hi Brad. Thanks for engaging with this quick take. I’ve read your comment multiple times and am struggling to understand what it means. I would appreciate if you could try and re-explain the second and third paragraphs of your comment for me.
EZ#2
After doing a LOT of reading of Fiqh, and speaking to islamic scholars, it seems that (for the purposes of EA- so ignoring most of the permitted uses of zakat, like freeing slaves, promoting the faith etc), anything other than an org which directs zakat to poor muslims would be religiously dubious and unlikely to be strictly zakat compliant.
This is a pretty big disappointment for me: I went into this research with an expectation that there would be some reputable, sizeable minority of opinions which would support using zakat for things like the public health of a largely but not solely Muslim population, which would at least enable us to try and promote a small number of e.g. GiveWell recommended charities.
I think that this means a couple of things:
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thinking about “To Whom?”: in terms of interventions, direct cash transfers to the poorest people (which are truly what zakat is meant to be used for) is likely going to be the most cost-effective way to deploy zakat. The most widely appealing way to do this would either be to start a new org which is basically “GiveDirectly to Muslims only”, or to get GD to run a dedicated zakat compliant program (like the one they ran in Yemen in 2023). We could try and run a “Give Directly for Mostly Muslims” and hope that we’d still be able to convince/attract a sizeable portion of zakat from Muslims who aren’t super orthodox with their adherence to the obligations of zakat when it comes to recipient eligibility (I guess this would look like promoting GD more strongly as an org to give zakat to, and helping GD set-up proper zakat-compliant systems for handling zakat).
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Thinking about “From Whom?”: I think the bulk of the work to do now on this project is to figure out how to go about capturing the biggest slice of zakat possible. There are a bunch of ways which philanthropic fundraising can go (focusing on UHNWIs, retail donors, institutional donors etc), and figuring out which strategy to prioritise, and honing the pitch for effective zakat, are all important steps.
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Yeah on the face of it, this simple case is extremely appealing. As you do more work looking at the specifics, it becomes more evident that there are a number of pretty significant hurdles
Yep, thanks !
took me ~5min
EZ#1
The world of Zakat is really infuriating/frustrating. There is almost NO accountability/transparency demonstrated by orgs which collect and distribute zakat—they don’t seem to feel any obligation to show what they do with what they collect. Correspondingly, nearly every Muslim I’ve spoken to about zakat/effective zakat has expressed that their number 1 gripe with zakat is the strong suspicion that it’s being pocketed or corruptly used by these collection orgs.
Given this, it seems like there’s a really big niche in the market to be exploited by an EA-aligned zakat org. My feeling at the moment is that the org should focus on, and emphasise, its ability to be highly accountable and transparent about how it stores and distributes the zakat it collects.
The trick here is finding ways to distribute zakat to eligible recipients in cost-effective ways. Currently, possibly only two of the several dozen ‘most effective’ charities we endorse as a community would be likely zakat-compliant (New Incentives, and Give Directly), and even then, only one or two of GiveDirectly’s programs would qualify.
This is pretty disappointing, because it means that the EA community would probably have to spend quite a lot of money either identifying new highly effective charities which are zakat-compliant, or start new highly-effective zakat complaint orgs from scratch.
- Expressions of Interest: Starting an Islamic Effective Giving Org by (Jun 18, 2024, 3:08 PM; 102 points)
- 's comment on Expressions of Interest: Starting an Islamic Effective Giving Org by (Jun 20, 2024, 10:19 PM; 11 points)
- 's comment on Expressions of Interest: Starting an Islamic Effective Giving Org by (Jun 21, 2024, 2:17 PM; 6 points)
- 's comment on My quick thoughts on donating to EA Funds’ Global Health and Development Fund and what it should do by (Dec 17, 2023, 5:40 PM; 2 points)
I started research into farmed animal welfare in Muslim countries and I think this is a useful way to share little updates along the way, and also to track any ideas I come up with so I can refer back to them when I need to compile my findings. Because I’m also working on a grant looking into effective Zakat, and I think I’ll end up doing the same thing for that, I’m going to be numbering farmed animal welfare quick takes with FAW# and Effective Zakat quick takes with EZ#.
so.
FAW#1.
Before starting with this project, I was operating under the assumption that there is a huge amount of good to be done in getting muslims to reduce/cease their consumption of meat. I still think that is the case. However, the reason I though this was to do with animal welfare—I thought that the conditions of farmed animals are so bad, and there are plenty of mentions of the importance of the kind treatment of animals throughout the islamic literature (including in the texts pertaining to Halaal slaughter) that there is a clear argument to be made that factory farmed meat should be rejected by muslims.
I have come to realise that there is a MUCH stronger argument against the consumption of meat for muslims, which is that many (if not most) slaughter techniques employed in the industrialised abattoirs are probably not halal compliant.
Finished reading it (Chip Wars): I enjoyed it a lot, thanks !
I’d held off on Chip Wars because I had assumed it’d be too surface level for the average EA who listens to 80k and follows AI progress (e.g. me) but your endorsement definitely has me reconsidering that
Thanks !
Thanks ! :)
Thank you :)
This does answer the question and is much appreciated! Do you have any sources I can cite (other than the paper linked in your response) ?