Zakah, as a type of ibadah, is concerned with money, wealth or property. By definition, it is an amount of money that a capable Muslim is required to pay out to the needy (those who deserve receiving it) in order to purify his/ her wealth (originally, zakah is an Arabic word that implies purification of one’s self and one’s wealth or mal, and then it came to denote mandatory alms giving or “giving to charity”). Zakah is typically calculated at a 2.5% (or 2.5775% for a solar calendar year) on a Muslim’s accumulated wealth (what has been left, every lunar year, above the minimum amount liable to the payment of zakah, in cash, bank account, gold or silver, tradable assets, after accounting for all bills, debts, and rights of others).

On the other hand, waqf (وقف), as a subject-matter, is an income-generating and/ or manfaah-producing property whose yield or benefits (ghallat al-waqf) are assigned by the owner in perpetuity to a named group of individuals or the public. The owner, establishing waqf, donates it and surrenders ownership and control over the waqf corpus/ assets.

Both zakah and waqf involve giving: a unilateral transfer of wealth to others (without the right to request or expect any countervalue or compensation in return). However, the very nature of each type of giving makes means that both cannot intersect: zakah calls for immediate payment of its amount (a percentage on zakatable assets), while waqf involves endowing to others (the defined beneficiaries) any form of wealth for perpetuity, irrespective of amount or size. Shari’ah categorically prohibits waqf al-zakah as such an act, though benevolent in all appearance, amounts to postponement of the payment of zakat and investing its funds in a long-term venture or project whose yield (ghallat al-waqf) is expected to materialize in the future.

In other words, zakah can be likened to an expense that needs to be paid once it is duly calculated and determined, while waqf is inherently similar to an investment that is expected to yield a return in the future. Furthermore, determination of beneficiaries is another feature that distinguishes these two types of benevolent act: in zakah, beneficiaries are clearly determined by the primary sources of shari’ah (8 types of beneficiaries), while in waqf, it would be up to the party establishing waqf (waqif) to determine its beneficiaries.