Zakat is a due rather than a donation and the vocabulary matters: it is owed, calculable, and its recipients are specified in the Quran rather than chosen by the giver. The rate is two and a half percent of qualifying wealth — cash, gold, silver, trade goods, and in most rulings investments — held for a full lunar year above the nisab threshold, which is pegged to the value of a set weight of gold or silver. Crucially it is a levy on stock, not income: a modest earner with no savings may owe nothing while an idle fortune is taxed annually. The eight categories in Quran 9:60 include the poor, the destitute, those in debt, the stranded traveller, the ones who collect it, and those whose hearts are to be reconciled — a category jurists have argued over for centuries. Malaysia, Pakistan, Sudan and Saudi Arabia collect it as a state levy in some form; elsewhere it goes through mosques and charities, and global zakat flows are estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year.