They therefore permit it for the zakah collector even when he is well-to-do, and likewise for judges and all others whose services bring general benefit to the Muslims. Those who do not permit it reason by analogy that zakah may never be given to anyone who is wealthy.
The source of their disagreement is this: Is the rationale for assigning zakah to the eight classes named in the verse mere need, or both need and public utility?
• Those who look only at the needy recipients expressly mentioned in the verse say that the sole consideration is need.
• Those who say that both need and general benefit warrant taking zakah treat the collector’s share as grounded in public utility, while grounding the rest of the shares in need.
As for the degree of affluence that bars a person from receiving zakah:
• Al-Shāfiʿī holds that the bar is the least amount to which the designation “wealth” applies.
• Abū Ḥanīfah maintains that a person is deemed wealthy once he possesses the nisāb, for these are the people whom the Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—called “rich” in his instruction to Muʿādh:
“Inform them that Allah has made obligatory upon them a charity to be taken from their rich and returned to their poor.”
If the “rich” are those who own the nisāb, the “poor” must necessarily be those who do not.
• Mālik, however, sets no fixed amount; the matter, in his view, is left to ijtihād.
The root of their dispute is whether the wealth that blocks eligibility is a technical Sharʿī concept or a purely linguistic one.
• Those who treat it as a Sharʿī concept equate wealth with possession of the nisāb.
• Those who treat it linguistically look to the minimum that warrants the name “wealthy.” Some think that this minimum can be quantified for every era and every individual, and so they specify a figure. Others hold that it cannot be fixed, varying instead with circumstances, needs, persons, places, and times; for them the matter is left to scholarly judgment.
Abū Dāwūd transmits a report in which the Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—set the threshold that bars zakah at ownership of fifty dirhams, and another report that puts it at an uqiyyah, i.e., forty dirhams. Some jurists adopted these two narrations as the definition of affluence.
On this same question they also disagreed about the respective states of the faqīr and the miskīn and how to differentiate between them.
• Some jurists say that the faqīr is better off than the miskīn; this is the position of the Baghdādī followers of Mālik.
• Others say that the miskīn is better off than the faqīr; this is the view of Abū Ḥanīfah and his associates, and of al-Shāfiʿī in one of his two opinions. In his second opinion