Clarification 7 - Penalty Zakat
Part of Alban Fejza: Refutations - The "Clarifications"
I. His Conclusions, and How He Reaches Them
Clarification 7 announces that Zakat has exactly 19 subcomponents: the two from his Clarification 5, plus seventeen "Penalty Zakat" items - "financial penalties for something wrong which you did" - validated by the sin offerings of Leviticus. The "red" penalties are administered by "the messenger or the Congregation Directors whom he puts in charge": pay an equitable charity when you publicly admit a sin ("once you pay, then your sin is erased"); contribute a charity to confer with the messenger (58:12); and the centerpiece - whenever a submitter receives an inheritance from a non-submitter, it is really "unowned wealth" (ghanimtum), and 20% of it is owed: 2.5% given directly to the needy, and 17.5% declared and spent only with the preapproval of your Congregation Director, on establishing masjids, maintaining masjids, and "means which help disseminate the message" - the media operation of the messenger himself. He warns, from the Book of Acts, that whoever hides such money is cursed, "and Hell is awaiting him."
Along the way, Clarification 7 quietly demolishes Clarification 5. There, the 2.5% was "extracted" from the Quran as an exact result; here he concedes: "the amount of 2.5% is never mentioned directly in the Quran, and that is because it's not always 2.5%." Both statements are his. Only one system survives its own sequel - and neither survives the Book, as follows.
II. The Count of 19 Is Manufactured
The number is the method. He reports reading the whole Quran "just for this" and finding precisely 19 financial purifications - the sacred count of his mathematical self-authentication. The list only reaches 19 by padding. Repaying a loan (#10) and returning what was entrusted to you (#12) are listed as "purifications" - but returning another person's property is not charity; it was never yours. Both items are drawn from the same verse (4:58: "GOD commands you to give back anything the people have entrusted to you"), just as three separate items (#13, #14, #15) are carved from the single verse 2:196, and a travel bond (2:283) - a guarantee later returned - is counted as a purification too. Remove the double-counting and the debts-relabeled-as-charity, and the count collapses well short of 19; keep them, and one could as easily harvest 23. The target was fixed before the reading began.
The list was not even checked. His item #6 - the estranged wife, freeing a slave, fasting, feeding sixty poor - he cites to 2:233. His item #7 - two years of food and clothing for the nursing mother - he cites to 58:3-4. The citations are swapped: the estrangement atonement is 58:3-4 ("...you shall fast two consecutive months... If you cannot fast, then you shall feed sixty poor people"), and the two-year provision is 2:233 ("Divorced mothers shall nurse their infants two full years... The father shall provide the mother's food and clothing equitably"). The expiations themselves are real and Quranic - the oath atonement of 5:89, the fasting substitute of 2:184, the engagement compensation of 2:236-237, the Hajj provisions of 2:196 and 5:95, the accidental-death law of 4:92, the pardoned-murder compensation of 2:178. What is not Quranic is the relabeling: these are God's expiations and duties, personal and complete as written, requiring no messenger's office - and the Quran nowhere numbers them as "subcomponents of Zakat," let alone as nineteen.
III. "Once You Pay, Your Sin Is Erased" - Absolution at the Director's Desk
His #17 converts 9:102-103 into a standing rule that a submitter who publicly admits a sin "should pay for it publicly, so that the others know that justice was restored" - "once you pay, then your sin is erased." Here are the verses:
[9:102] There are others who have confessed their sins; they have mixed good deeds with bad deeds. GOD will redeem them, for GOD is Forgiver, Most Merciful.
[9:103] Take from their money a charity to purify them and sanctify them. And encourage them, for your encouragement reassures them. GOD is Hearer, Omniscient.
GOD redeems the confessors - that is the verse's mechanism, and the instruction to take a charity was given to His prophet regarding them. The Quran's standing doctrine of forgiveness is repentance, not tariff: "He is the One who accepts the repentance from His servants, and remits the sins" (42:25); "never despair of GOD's mercy. For GOD forgives all sins" (39:53). A schedule in which sins are "erased" upon payment, priced and processed by an organization, is not Zakat and not Submission - it is the indulgence system, rebuilt at the Congregation Director's desk, with 24:19 (a condemnation of those who love to see immorality spread) transplanted to make the confession itself the billable event.
His #18 does the same with access to himself. He quotes 58:12 - believers offering "a charity" before conferring with the messenger - and omits everything around it. Rashad's verse reads "you shall offer a charity (to the poor) before you do so" and ends "If you cannot afford it, then GOD is Forgiver, Most Merciful." And the very next verse closes the matter: "If you failed to give to charity before conferring, then repented thereafter, GOD accepts your repentance" (58:13). A provision addressed to the community of God's prophet, whose charity went to the poor, whose inability was excused, and whose lapse God Himself forgave in the following verse, is revived as an access fee to a man whose messengership rests on the arithmetic already dismantled in Clarification 12.
IV. The 20% Levy: A Dead Man's Lie Converted Into a Tax
The centerpiece runs through 8:41. He tells his audience: "The verses says, if you get 'inheritance' from non-submitters, you should give 20% of it to God, the messenger, the relatives, the orphans, the needy, and the traveling alien." Here is what the verse says:
[8:41] You should know that if you gain any spoils in war, one-fifth shall go to GOD and the messenger, to be given to the relatives, the orphans, the poor, and the traveling alien...
Spoils in war - Rashad's rendering, consistent with 8:1 ("The spoils of war belong to GOD and the messenger") and with the title Rashad placed over 59:7: "The Spoils of War." There is no "inheritance," no "non-submitters," and no "unowned wealth of any type" in the verse; that sentence is Alban's, presented as God's. And notice the verse's own flow of funds: the fifth goes to God and the messenger "to be given to the relatives, the orphans, the poor, and the traveling alien" - the entire fifth lands on the needy. Alban's split sends 2.5 points of his 20 to those categories and reroutes 17.5 - seven-eighths of the levy - to masjid construction and "disseminating the message," under preapproval by directors he appoints, on the authority of 59:7, which he says "gives me the authority to divide it in any portions I decide." The verse he quotes distributes to orphans; the system he built distributes to his own mission budget.
The derivation beneath it is stranger still. The dying disbeliever of 23:99, he says, revokes his will at death - his "true will" is to return and re-give his wealth, now at 10%, doubled to 20% for having enjoyed it twice - so the estate becomes ownerless, and the heir owes the percentages of a hypothetical second life. Read the passage he built this on, under the title Rashad gave it - "The Dead Never Come Back Until the Day of Resurrection":
[23:99-100] When death comes to one of them, he says, "My Lord, send me back. I will then work righteousness in everything I left." Not true. This is a false claim that he makes. A barrier will separate his soul from this world until resurrection.
"Not true. This is a false claim that he makes." God's own verdict on the deathbed wish - the wish Alban elevates into a binding testament that voids wills and taxes heirs. The doctrine's foundation is a statement the Quran labels a lie in the same breath it is uttered. And the salvation arithmetic attached to it - "with 10% Zakat, this disbeliever would be saved" - collides with the Quran's explicit ruling on postmortem payment:
[3:91] Those who disbelieve and die as disbelievers, an earthful of gold will not be accepted from any of them, even if such a ransom were possible. They have incurred painful retribution; they will have no helpers.
An earthful of gold cannot purchase what Alban prices at ten percent. The supporting theology fares no better: his claim that God "has retracted His ownership from Earth temporarily" - cited, remarkably, to 19:40 - inverts the verse he cites: "We are the ones who inherit the earth and everyone on it; to us everyone will be returned." His authority for buying weapons "in the cause of God" is given as 80:60 - a verse that does not exist; Sura 80 has 42 verses. His "Custodians of the Sacred Masjid" honorific cites 9:19, a verse that rebukes treating custodianship as a substitute for belief, and 8:34, which says "The true custodians thereof are the righteous." His future "Mahdi frees Mecca" reading of 48:27 transplants a vision the verse itself declares fulfilled - and collides with Rashad's own writings on the Mahdi, examined in Clarification 23. His disclosure doctrine leans on 93:11 - "You shall proclaim the blessing your Lord has bestowed upon you" - and on 40:16, which describes the Day when nothing is hidden from GOD; neither says a word about declaring estates to an organization. And when Quranic material runs out, he reaches outside it: Leviticus for the penalty category, Genesis for the tithe, the Book of Acts - with Peter recast as "the messenger" - to warn that hidden money brings death and Hell, and al-Bukhari 6764, cited approvingly, for the rule his whole doctrine reconstructs: the hadith that a Muslim does not inherit from a disbeliever. A system advertised as "the Quran, the whole Quran, and nothing but the Quran" arrives, once again, at the scholars' law - this time with Bukhari on the citation line.
V. The System Contradicts Its Own Sequels
Clarification 5 "extracted" 2.5% exactly; Clarification 7 concedes it "is never mentioned directly in the Quran." Clarification 5 declared wealth re-impure every lunar year; Clarification 7 rules a submitter's estate permanently pre-purified for heirs "because the deceased submitter has already purified that property." Clarification 6 forbade every gathering but Friday prayer as "distractions"; Clarification 7 requires estates to fund the very media apparatus those gatherings would have used. And the wage disclaimers he repeats - "I will personally never accept any payment" (42:23) - quote a verse whose second half he does not apply: "Say, 'I do not ask you for any wage. I do ask each of you to take care of your own relatives.'" The verse routes the believer's care to his own family - the same family whose charity Clarification 6 tried to redirect, and whose inheritance Clarification 7 now taxes at 20% into a fund spent on the messenger's mission with the messenger's directors' approval. The money never touches his wallet; it builds his pulpit. That is what 63:7 is deployed to protect - a verse about the hypocrites of Muhammad's community, pre-loaded against anyone who questions the levy.
VI. What Survives - and What the Rest Is For
Peer review, as always. The root of Zakat does mean purification, and 20:76 does bless "those who purify themselves." The expiations on his list are genuine Quranic law - oaths (5:89), missed fasts (2:184), estrangement (58:3-4), the nursing mother's provision (2:233), engagement and divorce compensation (2:236-237), accidental death (4:92), pardoned murder (2:178), Hajj offerings and fines (2:196, 5:95) - each personal, each complete as God wrote it, each requiring no register and no director. Returning trusts (4:58) and honoring bonds (2:283) are commanded honesty. All of that stands - none of it is his, and none of it is "Penalty Zakat."
What is his: the count of nineteen, the payment that "erases" sin, the access fee, the ownerless-estate doctrine built on a wish God calls a false claim, the 20% levy on inheritances from non-submitter families - which, for a community of converts, means nearly every member's parents - and the 17.5% mission fund his directors preapprove. None of it was taught by Rashad; no Penalty Zakat, no inheritance levy, no payment-for-absolution exists anywhere in his translation, his appendices, or the community he led. Clarification 5 built the register, Clarification 6 built the command structure, and Clarification 7 attaches the revenue: maintenance fees at the desk, tolls at the messenger's door, and an estate tax on the one inheritance most converts will ever receive. The Quran's word for taking religion down this road was quoted in the refutation of Clarification 12 and applies without alteration here: they utter lies and attribute them to GOD, knowingly (3:78).
See also the pattern across his material: The Underlying Issue.