Zakat on Rikāz and Minerals

He writes: “Abū Ḥanīfah said that rikāz is a name for whatever has been embedded by the Creator or by any creature.”

I respond: It would be more accurate to say, “the later Ḥanafīs said…,” for Abū Ḥanīfah himself and his earliest disciples confined the term rikāz to what Allah placed in the earth of gold and silver alone. Abū Yūsuf states in al-Kharāj, p. 26: “Rikāz is the gold and silver that Allah created in the earth on the very day it was created.” Imām Muḥammad records the same in al-Muwaṭṭaʾ, p. 174, and then adds: “One-fifth is due on it, and that is the position of Abū Ḥanīfah and the majority of our jurists.”

Imām Muḥammad and others argued from the ḥadith of Abū Hurayrah in which the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) said, “On rikāz there is one-fifth.” They asked, “What is rikāz, O Messenger of Allah?” He replied, “The gold and silver that Allah created in the earth on the day it was created.” Al-Bayhaqī transmitted the report, branding it extremely weak, and he quoted al-Shāfiʿī’s verdict to the same effect. The Ḥanafī scholar al-Zaylaʿī also graded it weak in Naṣb al-Rāyah (2/380); consult it there.

The defect lies in the presence of ʿAbdullāh ibn Saʿīd ibn Abī Saʿīd al-Maqburī, who is unanimously deemed weak. Ṣiddīq Khān assumed the narrator to be the father, Saʿīd ibn Abī Saʿīd, and therefore declared him reliable and cited by the two Ṣaḥīḥs; on that basis he used the report as proof. I quoted his remarks and refuted him—together with others unaware of the ḥadith’s status—in my treatise Aḥkām al-Rikāz.

In that treatise I demonstrated that, in linguistic usage, rikāz encompasses both mineral ore and buried wealth, whereas in Islamic law it refers specifically to treasure interred during the pre-Islamic era. I supplied the textual proofs and supporting evidence for this conclusion.