Friday Sermon by: Alban Fejza, Online Congregation Director

Summary:

In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza explains his understanding from the Quran that Zakat is a collective charity to be collected and distributed in an organized way, and answers the accusation that he does it for money by calculating that it costs him about 700,000 Euros.

Video Transcript:

Praise be to God. There is no other god except God. As you know, after many years of believing that Zakat is a personal obligatory charity, God guided me to the realization, based on the Quran, that Zakat is actually a collective charity which should be collected and distributed in an organized way. I delayed the publication of this realization for a while, because I did not want people to think that I was asking them for money, which has been a no-no throughout my life, and it was a no-no among the submitters, and we all agreed that it is a no-no. We were basing this on Quranic verses which seem to say that we should avoid religious leaders who ask people for money. This is how we mainly understood verse 34 in chapter 9, for example, which says that many religious leaders take the people’s money illicitly, and repel from the path of God, but we did not actually pay attention to the second part of the verse which says that this is the case only if they collect that money and do not spend it in the cause of God. So, it is fine to collect the obligatory part of charity if it goes 100% in the cause of God, and if we do not withhold it. And my hesitation to make this realization public lasted until I started feeling guilty for not taking action to help the poor, just because I did not want my public image to be ruined. And as expected, as soon as I made this public, people started accusing me that I was doing this for my own financial gain. They were already confused, but this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. About 10 friends in Sweden stopped talking to me, the leaders of about 100 other submitters in Chennai, India, who had previously claimed to believe me, they also stopped talking to me, at least the ones through whom I had been keeping my contacts with, and I don’t know about the others. Anyway, it was already fixed in their head that even a messenger should not collect and distribute charity. And of course, as I expected, people all over the social media accused me that I am doing this for my own financial gain. Let’s see how much I gain financially from this. Let’s calculate how much “my own ideas” benefit me financially. First of all, implementing the Zakat system globally requires work and efforts, as much as a full-time job, if not more, and I would not be able to implement it unless I quit my job. So I quit my job for good, and I calculated that by quitting it I lost 550,000 Euros over the next 33 years in which I could have worked. (I will tell you another time why the next 33 years), but let’s stay on topic. So, 550,000 Euros lost already. Second, I am only allowed to implement the Zakat system online, if I provide Friday sermons online, and vice-verse, because they go together. You can not collect Zakat online while not providing a solution for Friday sermons online for the same people, and you should not provide a solution for the Friday sermons online, unless you collect Zakat, because otherwise you would be causing divisions in the online community of submitters. Anyway, for me, this means that I am obliged to use my personal apartment as a makeshift studio for the Online Friday Sermons, and as a makeshift office for the Zakat system, which I otherwise could rent to someone else, and earn money from it, because it would suit me to rent it. If I rented it, I calculated that I would get about 95,000 Euros over the next 33 years. Now, let’s talk about inheritance. According to the old understanding of the inheritance laws which was not connected with the global Collective Zakat, if my father died today, I would inherit wealth from him. He owns about 250,000 Euros, and so my mother would get about 31 thousand Euros, my two sisters would get about 36.5 thousand Euros each, and my brother and I would get about 73 thousand Euros each. However, this is not Quranic when you understand how the global Zakat system works. It enables us to identify a muslim or a submitter, and therefore my father who does not give Zakat would not qualify as a muslim, which means that the Quranic laws about inheritance from non-submitters or non-muslims would apply in that case. When non-muslims (or non-zakt givers) die, we get whatever is given to us, whatever the state gives us, not necessarily what is right. So, in this new correct way, I will not really get any direct inheritance from him. I would only get it as a prize from the state which guarantees it for me. So, according to the state, my father’s wealth would be split into five equal parts (my mother, my brother, me, and my two sisters), and as a result, I would only get 50,000 Euros, instead of the 73,000 Euros which I mentioned earlier. But it does not stop there. I would have to dedicate one fifth of it to God, to build mosques, according to verse 41, in chapter 8, because it was wealth gained from the death of a non-submitter. So, now I am left with only 40,000 Euros. So, as you can see, my insisting on the new understanding of how the Zakat of the prizes or so called inheritances should be given, I went from 73,000 Euros of inheritance, down to 40,000 Euros of inheritance. I just lost an additional 33,000 Euros.

But it does not stop there. Now, I will have to pay Zakat based on wealth, not based on income, and because I quit my job, had I applied the old understanding, I would pay nothing, but with the new correct system, I will have to pay about 22,000 Euros at least over the next 33 years. So, in total, I am losing 550,000 Euros from quitting my job, 95,000 Euros from the blocked apartment, 33,000 Euros from inheritance, and 22,000 Euros from paying Zakat from wealth instead of income. This totals to 700,000 Euros. So, if I understood the Quran according to how some ignorant people might want me to interpret it, I would have 700,000 Euros more, but according to the correct implementation, by implement a global Zakat system, I will be losing about 700,000 Euros. So, unless I steal 700,000 Euros from the Zakat system, it definitely does not suit me financially to do this. So, how can anyone assume that I am doing this for money? How can they claim that I am asking them for money? I am losing 700,000 Euros from this. The only people getting more money from this are the poor, and maybe later on exactly those who are now accusing me, but definitely not me. But, I am still doing it, because it is the correct thing to do.

Ultimately, it will suit me as well, because only one palace in heaven costs more than 700 thousand Euros, actually more than 700 million euros, more than 700 billion Euros, more than 700 trillion Euros, more than 700 quadrillion Euros, which is more than the whole earth. So, yes I am doing it for a financial gain, but not for the cheap financial gains which haters might assume, but for the record breaking financial gains which God promised us. So, yes the Zakat system does ultimately benefit me. It also benefits you, and it can also benefit them, if they only understood. It benefits all of us. It’s God’s system. And by the way, it would be unwise of me to give up 700 thousand Euros, unless I was confident that we will be able to help the poor with more than that. We will be able to help them with 700 billion, not million, 700 billion Euros until the end of the world. We will start slow, and finish fast, but 700 billion is definitely a realistic number until the end of the world. And if we add all the Zakat from the previous generations, and the Zakat collected and distributed from now until the end of the world, and take the inflation into account, we would be able to buy planet earth with it. It’s not a metaphor. For real.

The disbelievers will be left with nothing. By the way, some of those friends which I mentioned earlier who do not agree that we should collect and distribute Zakat, they will probably rejoin us, but not until they realize that they ran away from the truth not because they disagreed with me, but because they love their wealth too much, and their children too much, and their wives too much, and their husbands too much, and their jobs too much. I really felt like they wanted to agree with me, and they respected me, but loving their wealth too much will hold them back, at least for a while, if not forever. How terrible it will be for some of them when they realize in the next world that it was not their intellectual thinking about these issues which kept them away from my words, but it was the stinginess inside their hearts which kept them away from the correct way of charity? What do people expect? Do they think that they can be ten times wealthier, while being ten times less qualified, and still be equally guided? No way. No chance. They will never understand my words, they will never understand the Quran, as long as they are unfairly rich. There is nothing wrong with being rich, but unfair wealth prevents guidance. They have understood how these things work the wrong way around. They want to understand my words first as a condition for giving the Collective Charity, but that’s not how it works. It’s not my words which lead them to charity. It’s their charity which will lead them to my words. Verse 92, chapter 3. So, they will be confused as long as they are stingy. And if they only were smart enough to try it, to say, you know what, “Let me give the Collective Charity”, and give it without fear that it will go to waste, and give it for the sake of God, and then they will finally be able to understand what I was really talking about, and that they were able to verify exactly where their charity is going all along, and the curtain will be removed from their hearts.