In Surah al-Baqarah, Allah says regarding our charity:
إِن تُبْدُوا الصَّدَقَاتِ فَنِعِمَّا هِيَ ۖ وَإِن تُخْفُوهَا وَتُؤْتُوهَا الْفُقَرَاءَ فَهُوَ خَيْرٌ لَّكُمْ ۚ
“If you disclose your charitable expenditures, they are good; but if you conceal them and give them to the poor, it is better for you..” [2: 271]
There is a subtle beauty in the language here and it exists in the positioning of the two words: Disclosure (Tubdu) and Concealment (Tukhfu)…
When giving a general charity, it’s fine and good to do it openly – there’s nothing wrong with that (fa-ni’imma hiya). But the discreetness and the word for ‘conceal‘ has been directly linked to when giving charity to a poor and needy person. And some of the scholars said that this is in order to honour the poor person and not humiliate them in public – because as the passage later explains, a lot of needy people are hidden within the community and you would never know they are poor because they don’t often show it. So hide your charity to them and do not expose them.
…And Allah says “It is better for you” – perhaps to conceal the poor even more because though it’s good for us, it’s good for them too to receive discreet charity.
How subtle and how beautiful subhan’Allah…
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