Investing Zakat Funds in Endowment Projects Rooting and Regulators

Abstract

Praise be to God alone.. This research aims at clarifying the position of Islamic Shari'a on investing zakat money in endowment projects. It is organized into an introduction, two chapters and a conclusion. The importance of this research lies in the fact that the issue of investing zakat money in endowment projects is considered a dilemma in Islamic jurisprudence, as preceding jurists had not researched it fully. Thus, there is an urgent need to study this issue and to know the ruling of Islamic law regarding it. I tried in this research – investing zakat money in endowment projects - rooting and regulators – to deal with all its aspects; therefore, I first worked on defining "investment" in terms of language and terminology. I also worked on defining "zakat" and "endowment" in terms of language and terminology. Then, the research dealt with the ruling on investing zakat funds, as investing zakat funds is one of the main pillars of modern economics, and the opinions of jurists in that in terms of permissibility or refuting. Also, the research dealt with the regulations of this investment in endowment projects, and the ideal techniques of this investment. Moreover, the research focused on three ways of investment: investment through leasing, investment through sharing, and through speculation. In the conclusion, I mentioned the most important results and recommendations that I achieved from this research, including that the investment of zakat funds, in accordance with the drawn controls, accomplishes capital preservation along with increasing it, as well as expands the circle of benefiting from zakat funds, instead of a limited person or group benefiting from it; the scope of benefit will cover the largest number of the poor and needy.