Determinant Factors Effecting Poverty Among New Converts In Selangor, Malaysia

The justice in Islam had attracted and opens the hearts of non-muslins to accept Islam. The justice and truthfulness of Islamic teaching attracts the human to be part of its through conversion or reconciliation of hearts (Muallaf al-Qulub) and it is one of the zakat recipients mentioned in Al-Qur'an. In Selangor, zakat assistance to the new converts begins from the first day they become Muslims. The new Muslim would be immediately helped with MYR 500.00 monthly allowance for five years until they manage to act in accordance with Allah's orders and to perform worshipping (Mukallaf). This paper identifies the factors of new converts' poverty in Selangor, Malaysia using a logistic regression method. A set of survey questionnaires has been used in this research and 80 respondents were randomly selected from Selangor Zakat Centre (SZC) zakat recipient's list from the New Converts category for nine districts of Selangor in 2013. We estimate the probability of households with specified characteristics to fall below Malaysia's official poverty line. Results show that education, size, region, income and amount of zakat received significantly reduces the chance of being poor while gender, age, status were not significant predictor. Thus, these statistical measures have proven the positive role of zakat in reducing poverty among the new converts. The findings have important policy implications for zakat institution and Malaysian government which has pledged to reduce overall poverty rate to 2.8 per cent and eradicate hard core poverty by 2010 under the Ninth Malaysian Plan.