The Quran obligates the family. Islamic history obligates the state.  Bangladesh only remembers half 

When Bangladesh government defends its near-total absence from the business of elderly care, the argument is rarely made explicitly. It does not need to be. The cultural logic runs underneath the conversation, implicit and largely unchallenged: caring for elderly parents is a family duty, rooted in Islamic values, and the state's role is to enforce that duty through law, not to substitute for it. The Parents Maintenance Act, the proposed property amendment, the periodic invocations of filial piety in talk show commentary, all of it rests on this foundation.

The foundation is real. But it is also half the argument. And the half Bangladesh consistently omits is the half that makes an inconvenient demand on the state itself.

What is Nafaqa, and what does it do?

 The Islamic legal concept of ‘Nafaqa’ is well established and genuinely binding. It places on adult children a clear obligation to financially maintain their parents when those parents are in need. This is not cultural sentiment dressed in religious language. It is a substantive legal principle, recognized across the major schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and it rightly forms part of the moral architecture behind Bangladesh's elder care laws.

But Nafaqa has a scope, and that scope has limits. It applies within the family unit. It governs the obligations of children who have the means to provide. It does not, in any classical or contemporary reading, transfer all societal responsibility for the elderly onto the shoulders of individual relatives and then call the matter settled. It is a rule about family, not a complete theory of social welfare.

The complete theory existed too, and it ran parallel to Nafaqa from the very earliest decades of Islamic governance. Its institutional expression was the Bayt al-Mal.

The welfare state Islam actually built

 Scholars of Islamic history have noted that the concepts of welfare and pension were introduced in early Islamic law as forms of Zakat under the Rashidun Caliphate in the seventh century, leading some to describe the Caliphate as the world's first major welfare state.

The architect of that system was Hazrat Umar ibn al-Khattab (RA), the second Caliph. His economic policies laid the foundation of one of the earliest welfare states in history. Through the Bayt al-Mal, he introduced pensions for the elderly, widows, and orphans, alongside stipends for the needy, ensuring, in the words of historical accounts, that no individual in the Islamic state was left without support. The Bayt al-Mal functioned as a universal, equitable welfare institution. The institution was not a last resort whispered about with stigma. It was an instrument of governance, publicly administered and morally mandatory.

Classical Islamic scholarship holds that everyone in the welfare state is entitled to a reasonable standard of living and that the state should guarantee its citizens' clothing, housing, health facilities, educational opportunities, and access to food.

Bangladesh's government has quoted Islamic values at families for decades. It has not quoted them at itself.

The Waqf Bangladesh is sitting on

 There is a second instrument of Islamic social finance that Bangladesh is almost entirely failing to deploy for elder care: Waqf, the Islamic endowment system through which assets are permanently dedicated to charitable purposes.

Historically, Waqf funded hospitals, schools, soup kitchens, and care institutions across the Islamic world. The Ottoman Empire maintained extensive Waqf-funded welfare infrastructure for centuries. The principle is simple: wealth endowed for the public good generates perpetual benefit, overseen by trustees, immune from ordinary inheritance and redistribution.

Academic research on Malaysia's experience has found that Waqf has considerable potential to expand elderly care if managed professionally, with donors' monetary Waqf used to assist with the construction of geriatric homes, health clinics, and other services for the elderly. Malaysia has gone further, developing formal models that combine cash Waqf with takaful insurance to create sustainable funding streams for an ageing population.

Bangladesh has Waqf assets. It has an Islamic Foundation. It has a Zakat Board. What does that Zakat Board currently collect? In the 2020-21 fiscal year, the Zakat fund collected Tk35.3mn, roughly $414,000, against an estimated national Zakat potential of Tk550-600bn. Less than 1% of the country's Zakat potential is being captured by formal institutional channels. The rest flows informally, distributed at the discretion of individuals, producing good intentions and no infrastructure.

Analysts have argued that if the government made Zakat a national priority, rejuvenated the Zakat Board with a stronger mandate, and ran a sustained public campaign with the support of Islamic scholars, collecting at least Tk200bn annually is entirely achievable.

That mount of massive fund directed through a properly governed Islamic social finance architecture could fund a national network of Waqf-endowed care homes, staffed by trained professionals, anchored in Islamic values of dignity and community. It would not require a single taka of general taxation. It would not require Bangladesh to look at Norway or Sweden for a model. The model exists within its own tradition, built 14 centuries ago, refined and extended by Muslim-majority countries from Malaysia to the Gulf.

The Islamic Foundation Bangladesh, which currently operates the underfunded Zakat Board and administers mosque affairs, could be the institutional home for a national Waqf-based elder care initiative. It has the reach, the religious authority, and the public trust that a purely bureaucratic ministry would struggle to replicate. What it lacks is a government willing to give it a genuine mandate, genuine resources, and genuine accountability for outcomes.

The selective theology of inaction

Here is the uncomfortable truth at the centre of this argument. Bangladesh has not neglected elderly care because Islam teaches that the state has no role. Bangladesh has neglected elderly care because state-funded care costs money, requires bureaucratic capacity, and demands political will that no government has chosen to spend on a constituency that does not march, protest, or vote in blocs. Islam has been used as the rhetorical justification for that choice, not its cause.

Nafaqa is invoked. Bayt al-Mal is forgotten. The family obligation is enshrined in law. The state obligation is quietly shelved. The Zakat Board collects a fraction of its potential while the elderly of Bangladesh age and die alone in their quiet abodes. Private Islamic charities run small care homes on voluntary donations, filling a gap the state has deliberately left open. It is doing, at tiny scale and on charity budgets, what the state treasury should be doing at national scale. That is not an argument against private Islamic philanthropy. It is an argument for why the state's abdication is so theologically indefensible. If private individuals feel the Islamic obligation to act, it strains credulity to argue that the state, sitting on far greater resources and a clear constitutional mandate for social welfare, is exempt.

What the Islamic scholars should be saying

 This is also a question for Bangladesh's ulema and its Islamic institutions. The religious establishment has been vocal on family duty, on the sins of neglectful children, and on the importance of respecting parents. Those are legitimate and important teachings. But Islamic scholarship needs to have a second conversation, one that has not happened publicly in the wake of Nur Jahan Begum's death.

Where are the fatwas on the state's obligation to fund care for the elderly who have no family support? Where is the Islamic Foundation's position paper on deploying Waqf for elder care infrastructure? Where are the Friday khutbahs connecting Hazrat Umar ibn Khattab's stipends for the vulnerable to Bangladesh's 15 million elderly citizens?

The Islamic argument for a national elderly care system is not borrowed from Western liberal welfare theory. It is native to the tradition. It predates the UK's Care Act by thirteen centuries. It was practised by the most revered figures in Islamic governance history. Bangladesh does not need to look abroad for the intellectual foundation of this argument. It needs to read its own tradition more completely.

Nafaqa obligates the family. Bayt al-Mal obligates the state. Both principles are real. Both are binding. Bangladesh has spent decades enforcing one and ignoring the other. That is not Islamic governance. It is selective theology in the service of fiscal convenience. And the Nur Jahan Begums of this country are paying for that convenience with their lives.

--- Adil Mahmood is a former journalist and a public policy observer. This is his second piece on Bangladesh's elderly care crisis. His previous article was published by Bangla Outlook on 9 Jun 2026.