• aḥwāl (plural of ḥawl): it is called ḥawl because within that span a person “moves” from one state to another.
• Dinar: the mithqāl of gold, weighing 4.25 g.
• Zakāt (alms-due): originally zakwah, on the pattern faʿlah like ṣadaqah. When the wāw became mobile and was preceded by an open vowel, it changed into an alif, producing zakāt. The word is shared between the concrete and the abstract: it can denote the specific portion of wealth paid, and it can denote the act of purification itself.

Takeaways from the ḥadīth

1. The nisab (minimum taxable threshold) for silver—whether coined, in bullion, or as jewellery—is two hundred dirhams; this is a matter of consensus. The only debate concerns the weight of the dirham. Careful calculation shows that two hundred dirhams equal 595 g, roughly fifty-six Saudi riyals.
2. The nisab for gold is twenty dinars; one dinar equals one mithqāl, or about 85 g, which corresponds to eleven and three-sevenths Saudi gold guineas.
3. Al-Rawd al-Murbiʿ and other works state that gold and silver are combined to complete the nisab. Thus, if a person owns ten mithqāls and one hundred dirhams, each amount is half a nisab, but together they form a full nisab, and paying the zakāt on either amount satisfies the obligation for both, because their purposes and zakāt rulings are identical; they are two varieties of one genus.
4. Now that gold and silver coins have disappeared from circulation and have been replaced, as the medium of exchange, by paper currency, the contemporary fiqh councils have unanimously ruled that the legal rulings attach to paper money, since both share the quality of thamaniyyah (serving as a measure of value). Accordingly, today’s currency—paper money—carries the same rulings that once applied to the two precious metals with respect to zakāt, blood-money payments, sale prices, rulings on ribā (usury), currency exchange, and similar matters. A fuller discussion of this will appear, Allah willing, in the chapter on ribā.