Gaming Islamic Tax

My previous post mentioned zakat, the Islamic religious tax. An earlier post discussed the question of how strongly religious believers actually believe, where religion lies on the range between a pretty story and a real fact, between belief in Santa Claus and belief that the sun will rise tomorrow.

It occurs to me that the behavior of Muslims with regard to zakat provides one possible way of investigating the question. With zakat, as with most tax systems, a clever taxpayer can adjust his behavior to minimize the amount he owes. Someone paying because the state forces him to or because his neighbors will see him as a bad Muslim if he doesn't would presumably try to arrange his affairs to minimize taxes. Someone who is paying because God will reward or punish on the basis of perfect information about what he does and why or someone paying because he believes that he ought to do what God wants should be less willing to try to game the system.

How could one do so? Zakat consists of two categories. One is a fixed percentage of output for certain agricultural crops—ten percent for crops that are not irrigated, five percent for crops that are. The other is a capital levy of 2.5% on certain forms of wealth—gold and silver (except for jewelry) and a merchant's trade goods. For both, there is a minimal level below which no tax is owed. For agricultural crops it is something on the order of half a ton a year of dry produce, low enough so that a small farmer might choose to try to hold his output just below the cutoff so as not to have to pay any tax on it. If one had good data on agricultural output by individual Muslim farmers in a place where zakat was paid, it would be interesting to see whether farms producing crops that zakat was due on tended to produce quantities just below the cutoff.

The other category provides at least two different and more effective tactics for minimizing taxes. To begin with, gold and silver are taxable if held as wealth but not if used as jewelry.  Convert your working cash into jewelry, convert it back when needed for your business, and you avoid most of the tax. It would be interesting to see whether Muslim populations are more inclined to hold wealth as gold and silver jewelry than other populations that are in other ways similar.

The second tactic is based on the fact that the tax on a merchant's trade goods is based on the weight of the gold or silver for which they were purchased. Here again, there is a minimum value below which no tax is due. The weight of silver below which no tax is due is about eight times the weight of gold below which no tax is due. If the price ratio between gold and silver was eight to one, which isn't too far off what it was in the Middle Ages, the quantity of trade goods on which tax was owed would be the same whether they had been bought for gold or silver. 

Currently, an ounce of gold is worth about sixty-five times as much as an ounce of silver. That means that the minimum value of trade goods on which tax is due is about eight times as high if the goods were bought for gold than for silver. It would be interesting to see whether, in countries where zakat is collected according to the traditional rules, merchants, especially small merchants, deliberately arrange to do business in gold instead of silver in order to stay below the level at which it would be due.

Is Islamic Law Law?

We usually think of "law" as referring to rules enforced by government. I have now read most of a 14th century text on Islamic law (also available online), and one conclusion is that that is a misleading way of looking at the subject. It is true that many of the rules are enforceable by the state, but that, seen from within the system, is not what they are really about. Ultimately, all of the rules are seen as enforced not by the state but by God.

That point is illustrated by a mistake I made in my initial attempts to understand the system. In Islamic law, there are five categories of acts, ranging from obligatory to forbidden. I thought an obligatory act was one you could be legally punished for not doing, a recommended act one that you should do but were not legally obligated to do, and so on down the list. In fact, if my current source is correct, that is not what the categories mean. An obligatory act is one that God will reward you for doing and punish you for not doing. A recommended act is one that God will reward you for doing but will not punish you for not doing. The distinction has nothing to do with what the state will or will not punish.

In an earlier post, I raised the question of what the difference is between punishment and failure to reward. I think, although I am not certain, that I now understand the answer in the context of Islamic law. As best I understand the view, at least the version presented in the book I have just been reading, all Muslims eventually make it to heaven—although that has to be qualified by the observation that someone with sufficiently heretical beliefs doesn't count as a Muslim even if he thinks he does. Punishment is what a Muslim has to go through before he gets there, reward is what he gets when he finally makes it. Hell, for Muslims, is purgatory. It is permanent only for some non-Muslims.

The distinction between state law and divine law is paralleled by the distinction between taxes in the sense most of us are familiar with—money we have to give the government to be spent as it chooses—and zakat, Islamic religious "tax." The rules for how much you owe are similar in both systems. The difference is in whom you owe it to.

A good Muslim is supposed to pay an amount of zakat based on how much crop he has produced during the year or how much wealth of certain sorts he has. The money goes to eight categories of recipients: the poor, those in need, travelers, unpaid warriors for Islam, ...  . In three of the four schools of law, it is supposed to be evenly divided among the categories, in one the payer is free to allocate it as he wishes.

But in all schools, as best I can tell, the payer is free to decide who in each category gets his money. He can, if he wish, pay the money to the ruler, who is then supposed to hand it out appropriately. He can, if he prefers, pay it to some private individual who will distribute it for him—and is entitled to one of the eight shares as payment for doing so. He can distribute it himself. Again, the ultimate obligation is to God and exists whether or not there is a ruler to enforce it.

All of which I find interesting.