Sugar and Water Cost More Than Oil

There is very cheap oil in this country. For example: a litre of Coke costs about how much? Someone who does not buy Coke has to ask — about a dollar. So one is paying more for sugar and water than for a litre of oil. And sugar and water are pretty much inexhaustible resources, relatively — there are some problems now with water and things like that — whereas with oil one is dealing with an exhaustible resource, and it is grossly underpriced. Oil is grossly underpriced. A dollar forty is paid for a gallon of gas, and it will take a car thirty miles, forty miles; and relatively the same amount is paid for a bottle of sugar water that is going to rot the teeth and give diabetes. So it is really interesting that oil is so cheap. There is one man who has spent his working life in the oil business — he left teaching and came into it through his wife's family, who were in the oil business — and it drives him crazy: he says that oil should be around at least fifty dollars a barrel, or something like that. It is just grossly underpriced. But we have the luxury of having very cheap oil, and the majors, hard as it is to believe, actually maintain those low prices. And the exploration in this country — it is unbelievable how difficult it is to explore for oil in this country. There are still lots of oil reserves here, and most of the old oil fields of the 1930s and 1940s were very shallow: they did not have the technology to go down several miles; they would only go down very short distances. But oil exploration is really discouraged in this country, and most of the majors are just not interested any more, because they are making so much money off… It is more expensive here: it is much cheaper to buy underpriced oil from the Arabian Peninsula than to explore and exploit the resources here.

So Muslims in the United States pay the federal, state and city income and property taxes, and in addition to that they owe zakāt. Yes, they owe it — and many of them pay it, and many of them do not. There are many Muslims who do not pay zakāt any more, but there are many who still do, because now it is just an individual thing. There are many Muslims in the area: there are about seventy thousand Muslims estimated in the Greater Bay Area; of that seventy thousand, maybe eight to ten thousand are actually praying, and from those eight to ten thousand who are praying there might be some who are not paying zakāt. So it has now become more of an individual matter. A fair estimate is that about ten per cent, generally, within any given population in this country, are practising. And Muslims often fall in very high tax brackets in this country, because there are a lot of physicians and a lot of engineers, so they are paying a lot of taxes. The question of lending at interest, in relation to zakāt, belongs to the discussion of the Sharīʿah.