ABSTRACT
The zakāt donors were defined as those possessed of productive wealth derived from pastoralism, agriculture or trade. During the Ghayba, then, the Imāmīs emphasized the dissociation of the sacred from the profane by denying precisely those shares which would have served the administrative and military needs of the government. By the sixteenth century the three zakāt-recipient categories which by Ṭūsī had initially been declared sāqiṭ had been re-established as operative. By the early sixteenth century when Tahmāsp promoted the creation of a formally Shī'ī state, their aspirations and perceptions had been sharpened to a point where they presented themselves as the rightful authorities within such a state. According to Ṭūsī, zakāt might be paid either through the wakīl of the donor or through the imām/sā'ī. The religious reward of the individual might be vicariously acquired simply by his submission to the authority of the clerical class.
