Zakat as an Islamic Social Finance Instrument
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17509/kynqef56Keywords:
zakat, Islamic social finance, poverty alleviation, institutional governance, co-citation analysis, thematic mappingAbstract
Zakat, the obligatory almsgiving pillar of Islam, has evolved from a primarily devotional and redistributive practice into a formally theorized instrument of Islamic social finance, positioned alongside waqf and Islamic microfinance as a mechanism for poverty alleviation, financial inclusion, and, more recently, digitally mediated resource mobilization. Drawing on 272 peer-reviewed articles and reviews indexed in Scopus between 2010 and 2025, this article maps the intellectual and conceptual structure of zakat research through co-citation and keyword co-occurrence network analysis. The findings identify several co-citation clusters anchored, respectively, in foundational Islamic economic theory, zakat-payer compliance behavior, institutional efficiency and digitalization, and the intersection of zakat with mainstream poverty and social-protection scholarship. A complementary thematic strategic diagram indicates that the waqf–Islamic finance nexus and the poverty-alleviation/Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) theme function as the field's motor themes, appearing both well developed and tightly integrated with the wider literature, while institutional performance and governance research remains comparatively peripheral despite its practical centrality to zakat's effectiveness. This structural asymmetry suggests that scholarly attention may have outpaced the consolidation of governance-focused inquiry, even as digital zakat platforms raise new accountability questions. The article contributes a structural account of the field's development, rather than a descriptive one, and outlines a research agenda centered on institutional governance, cross-country comparison, and closer integration of the behavioral and institutional strands of the literature.
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