An Expert System for Calculating Zakat in Islam

Islam makes it mandatory for all rich Muslims to pay 2.5% of their annual savings to the needy people in the form of Zakat. It is straightforward to calculate Zakat if one's savings are in the form of cash only. However, it becomes a difficult task if a person has diverse annual savings e.g. crops, business, debts, animals, cash, gold, and silver etc. In such cases, a common individual may have to consult Islamic scholars to know exact amount of Zakat to be paid. There are more than Billions of Muslims consult scholars and pay Zakat every year. However due to different reasons, like inadequate number of scholars, availability and reachability of scholars, people don't pay zakat correctly. With the advancement of modern computer technology like internet, people have built some systems to facilitate calculation of Zakat. However, these systems are merely simple calculators, which just take total amount of all assets from the user and calculate 2.5% of this amount. In this paper, we proposes an expert system to enable common Muslims to calculate their Zakat without the need of visiting Islamic scholars. The proposed expert system is based on Islamic jurisprudence for Zakat on backend and asks questions like a scholar about assets, identifies assets eligible for Zakat and calculates payable Zakat. The proposed system is tested for all basic requirements and scenarios of Zakat to ensure reliability and accuracy and is also validated by some Islamic scholars of King Faisal University.