Ideals and Practices of Giving in Islam

It is in the "history of the moral ideas of the Semitis" that Marcel Mauss glimpses the origin of an important transformation of the gift which always affirms itself more as a "moral idea". Starting from Mauss’ insight, the aim of this article is to document this transformation, examining some conceptions and practices of the gift in Islam. Through the analysis of the sources and the aid of the historical and social researches is reconstructed a varied reality of gifts in the Arab-Islamic world. It’s about exchanges due to the sadaqa, a form of gift almost unknown in the Western World. It’s a question of a gift on voluntary basis that establishes a net of solidarity and cooperation widespread in the Islamic societies. Although spontaneous, the gifts due to the sadaqa are characterized by a certain regularity which is bound to the initiative of the individual, a regularity exposed to its idiosyncrasies and limits. The awareness that the ethics of the care, referable to the universe of the sadaqa, has to be strengthened was present since the Islam of the origins that feels the need to assure the solidarity making it compulsory: the zakat constitutes the juridical transcription of the sadaqa. A voluntary gift as the sadaqa thus becomes a regulative model for an obligation, the zakat, foreseen by the muslim law.