Follow Up: Categorizing Salary As Produce
Thank you for the response Umer Bhai. I wasn’t aware of the community guidelines so thank you for sharing. Will try to comply fully in the future. Regarding the point you raised, yes you are right and I agree the income mechanism for a retailer and trader is different, but that wasn’t my point. I just tried to respond to every argument I found in all the material I have come across that explains this Ijtihad. So for the point that it has now become a proper industry, I just tried pointing out that the entire services sector/industry includes primarily everything not related to the actual production in any way, and that includes wholesale and retail trade as well, thats why I raised this point. Another reasoning I encountered was that employees are essentially production units now, but production units are itself ‘inputs’, and can range from machines to anything that constitutes a cost of production, and wages are always accounted as such, so that is why I mentioned my second point. Its what ‘goes’ into production, not the actual production. You mentioned the similarity in the mechanism of production and salaries and I don’t understand that. Yes in a literary/wordplay sense you can say that it is our labor that produces our salary, but it is still not analogous to the production that Zakat was applied on (i-e agricultural produce) and is in every way more analogous to a compensation for your labor. I could similarly use these words to define the retailer’s income mechanism, that he uses both his labor and capital investment to produce his income, but 5 % certainly wouldn’t apply there, as the end-result or categorisation isn’t applicable as they both aren’t similar in essence. Same goes with wages. Yes instead of short term hiring on a per day basis you now become a permanent employ with annual packages divided into monthly payments but still, the contractual form has changed but not the essence as its still wages. For example, I joined a company on the 7th of last month and as a result was only compensated for 25 days, for the actual hours that I worked, based off of my pre decided compensation package. So you’re compensated for exactly the hours of labor you put in which account for your workdays. I still don’t see the analogy to the primary or secondary or production/manufacturing sector. And lastly, my other point was that the services industry is very vast as I demonstrated, and apart from contractual salary packages there are also fee for service models in many things like healthcare, financial consultancy etc. And my point was that that analogy could be found even in the past times (blacksmiths, doctors, tailors, tanners) but the production Zakat was never applied. I hope I’ve made myself clear. Would love if you would like to add something. JazakAllah.