What is the ruling on purchasing a house for a poor woman and her orphaned children from zakah funds?
Machine translationRead the Arabic original
Question:
May Allah reward you, Honorable Shaykh. This questioner says: I am a poor woman. My husband passed away, leaving behind orphaned children. I was living in a floor of a building that my husband and his brother owned. When my husband died, my husband's brother ordered us to leave the house so that we could sell it, or give him his share of the building. When the people of good learned of this, they collected a sum of zakah for us so that we could give it to him, making the building ours and our children's. A person said that she does not deserve to be given from the zakah, since the zakah has eight known categories of expenditure. Therefore, give us a ruling: Do I deserve what I took from the zakah to give to my husband's brother on my behalf and on behalf of my children, or do I not deserve that? Knowing that my husband (may Allah have mercy on him) did not leave us any money with which we could give it to his brother.
Answer:
If you are poor and cannot purchase the house except from the zakah, there is no harm. There is no harm in that. This is the first thing in which the zakah is spent, because you are poor and in need of shelter, and also a woman and orphans, and the people most in need of this thing. Yes.
May Allah reward you, Honorable Shaykh. This questioner says: I am a poor woman. My husband passed away, leaving behind orphaned children. I was living in a floor of a building that my husband and his brother owned. When my husband died, my husband's brother ordered us to leave the house so that we could sell it, or give him his share of the building. When the people of good learned of this, they collected a sum of zakah for us so that we could give it to him, making the building ours and our children's. A person said that she does not deserve to be given from the zakah, since the zakah has eight known categories of expenditure. Therefore, give us a ruling: Do I deserve what I took from the zakah to give to my husband's brother on my behalf and on behalf of my children, or do I not deserve that? Knowing that my husband (may Allah have mercy on him) did not leave us any money with which we could give it to his brother.
Answer:
If you are poor and cannot purchase the house except from the zakah, there is no harm. There is no harm in that. This is the first thing in which the zakah is spent, because you are poor and in need of shelter, and also a woman and orphans, and the people most in need of this thing. Yes.
Source
قناة «العلامة الدكتور صالح الفوزان»، [601 -954] ما حكم شراء بيت لمرأة فقيرة مع أولادها الأيتام من أموال الزكاة؟ - الشيخ صالح الفوزان — youtube.com
The Arabic text is a machine transcription of the audio recording.
