Zakah and blessing word count in the Qur'an

This article contains a list of all occurrences of the words "zakah" (tax) and "blessing" in the Qur'an. The purpose is to analyze the claim that they both appear 32 times and that means Allah put a hidden message "taxes are blessings" into the Qur'an via the equality in word count.

The lists can also serve as a reference for people who want to know where the Qur'an speaks about the zakah or blessings.

Zakah

The zakah is a tax that Muslims should pay in Islam. The Arabic word زكاة (zakah) ends on the letter ة (ta marbuta), that means the "t" at the end is pronounced when reading the word in a context of an Arabic text, but it is not read when reading the word alone. So when using this Arabic word in English, it is sometimes transliterated as zakah and sometimes zakat, due to the letter ta marbuta at the end.

In the Uthmani Script this word is written as زَّكَوٰةَ, while in the Simple Script, it is written as زكاة. This list uses the Uthmani Script.

The word is derived from the root زكو (z-k-w) and this is the list of all the words derived from this root in the Qur'an. We will see that from this root, there are also other words derived, which have a different meaning.

So the word zakah does not appear 32 times, as some apologists like to claim, but it appears only 30 times. This word count includes the forms with prefixes, which were often excluded in other apologetic word counts, so if we used that counting method, than there is even less occurrences.

Apologists probably simply searched for the sequence of Arabic letters زكوة (or زكاة in the Simple Script) and got 32 results, but did not realize that in 2 of those occurrences the word means something else:

• 18:81 "So we desired that their Lord might give them in his place one better than him in purity (زَكَوٰةً, zakatan) and nearer to having compassion."
• 19:13 "And tenderness from Us and purity (وَزَكَوٰةً, wa-zakatan), and he was one who guarded (against evil),"

Blessing

This is the list of all the occurrences of the word blessing (بركة‎‎, barakah) in the Qur'an. The difference here is, that all the words derived from the root برك (b-r-k) have the something to do with "blessing". There are no words with a completely different meaning derived from this root.

Conclusions

d

See also

d