According to the UN refugee agency, more than 117 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide by the end of 2025, and that number is expected to keep climbing through 2026. Behind that figure sit real crises many of us follow in our feeds every week: Sudan, now the largest displacement crisis on earth, with close to twelve million people driven from their homes. The Rohingya, stateless and still living in what remains the world's largest refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, more than eight years after the violence that emptied their villages. Gaza. Syria. Afghanistan. Millions of Muslims among them, praying in tents, raising children in camps, waiting for a return that may never come.
For a faith that begins its own calendar with an act of displacement, this is not an abstract policy issue. It is close to the center of the story.
The first refugees of Islam
The Islamic calendar does not start with a battle or a birth. It starts with a migration. In 622 CE, the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and his companions fled Mecca under threat of death and walked into an unknown future in Yathrib, later renamed Medina. Before that, many of the earliest Muslims had already fled once, to Abyssinia, seeking protection from a Christian king, Negus, who gave it to them as strangers with nothing to offer him in return.
The people who fled became known as the Muhajireen, the emigrants. The people of Medina who took them in became known as the Ansar, the helpers. What happened next is one of the most remarkable acts of hospitality recorded in any tradition. The Ansar did not simply tolerate the newcomers. Allah describes their response directly in the Quran:
"And [also for] those who were settled in the home [i.e. Medina] and [adopted] the faith before them. They love those who emigrated to them and find not any want in their breasts of what the emigrants were given but give them preference over themselves, even though they are in privation. And whoever is protected from the stinginess of his soul, it is those who will be the successful." (Surah Al-Hashr, 59:9)
The Prophet formalized this into a system of brotherhood, pairing each Muhajir with an Ansari who shared housing, income, and in some documented cases, divided their own property in half. This was not charity as a one-time gift. It was displaced people being fully absorbed into a new community's economic and social life, treated as kin rather than as a burden to be managed at arm's length.
That is the model Islam sets for how believers are meant to treat the displaced: not as a distant cause, but as people the Ansar loved even while it cost them something.
What zakat says about displaced people
The eight categories of zakat recipients laid out in Surah At-Tawbah (9:60) were not written with refugees as an afterthought. Several categories map onto their situation directly.
Al-fuqara and al-masakin, the poor and the needy, cover anyone lacking sufficient means to meet their basic needs, which describes the overwhelming majority of people in displacement, stripped of income, property, and often legal status in the country hosting them.
Al-gharimin, those in debt, can apply to displaced people who borrowed to survive the journey or to support family left behind, and now cannot repay.
Ibn al-sabil, the wayfarer, is the category scholars most directly connect to refugees. Classically it describes a traveler stranded away from home without access to their resources, even if they are financially secure elsewhere. A person who fled with nothing, whose assets sit frozen or destroyed in a country they cannot return to, fits this description closely. Zakat bodies and fiqh councils that have studied the question, including guidance developed in coordination with UNHCR's zakat program, generally affirm that refugees can be legitimate zakat recipients under one or more of these categories, and in practice many meet the criteria for several at once.
That matters practically. It means zakat, not only sadaqah, is a legitimate and often powerful tool for responding to displacement, provided the funds reach people who genuinely fall under one of these categories and the charity distributing them can show that.
Why refugee giving is hard to get right
Few causes generate more emotional urgency, and few are harder to evaluate from a distance. A handful of reasons keep showing up.
Crises move faster than due diligence. When a crisis breaks into the news, giving spikes in the first days and weeks, often before a charity has a real operational footprint on the ground. Money given in that window sometimes sits waiting for a program that has not been built yet.
Displacement is rarely short. Sudan's crisis, the Rohingya crisis, the Syrian and Afghan refugee situations: these are not thirty-day emergencies. They stretch into years and sometimes decades. A charity that only knows how to run an emergency appeal, and has no plan for the shelter, education, and livelihood needs that follow the first six months, is not equipped for the actual shape of most displacement.
Access is genuinely difficult. Conflict zones and border regions are hard and sometimes dangerous to operate in. That is a legitimate constraint, but it also means donors have less visibility than usual, and it is exactly the kind of gap that less scrupulous organizations exploit, knowing few donors can verify what happens once money crosses a border.
Vulnerable people are easy to exploit twice: once by the crisis and once by careless or dishonest programming. Refugee populations include large numbers of women, children, and elderly people separated from support networks. Safeguarding failures, and in the worst documented cases outright fraud, tend to concentrate in exactly the sectors where oversight is hardest.
None of this means refugee-focused giving should be avoided. It means it deserves the same scrutiny you would apply to any other cause, not less, even though the urgency of the images makes that scrutiny feel unnatural.
What a good refugee-response charity actually looks like
A few things distinguish organizations that are set up to help from those that are mostly set up to fundraise.
They plan past the emergency. Strong programs pair immediate relief (food, shelter, medical care) with a stated plan for what happens at month six and year two: education continuity, livelihood support, legal aid, eventual resettlement or return assistance. If an appeal only ever talks about the first thirty days, that is worth noticing.
They coordinate rather than duplicate. Serious organizations work alongside UNHCR, local authorities, and other agencies already present, rather than operating in isolation. Coordination is a sign of competence, not a dilution of impact.
They are specific about where the money goes. Vague appeals ("help refugees now") are far more common than appeals that name the camp, the population, and the actual program. Specificity is usually a sign the organization actually has people and infrastructure on the ground, not just a fundraising page.
They have safeguarding policies, not just good intentions. This matters most with populations that include large numbers of unaccompanied minors and women in vulnerable situations. A credible organization can point to how it screens staff and protects beneficiaries, not just how it spends donations.
This is precisely the kind of due diligence that is nearly impossible for an individual donor to do alone while scrolling between a fundraising post and a news article. It requires looking at governance, financial transparency, and program design together. That is exactly why Zakat+ built the Halal Score: so that work is already done before you give. Rather than assessing a refugee appeal from scratch every time a crisis trends, you can check a charity's score across Shariah compliance, impact, transparency, finances, and governance, and see how it holds up on the fundamentals that separate a real program from a well-produced appeal video.
A final thought
The Ansar did not wait for a vetting process to open their homes to the Muhajireen. But they also were not being asked to trust a stranger's fundraising page across an ocean: they were living alongside the people they helped, watching what happened to what they gave. That kind of proximity is not available to most of us giving from a distance today. The Halal Score exists to close that gap, so your sadaqah and zakat can reach displaced families with something closer to the confidence the Ansar had: that what you gave actually reached the person who needed it.
Open Zakat+ and check the Halal Score of any charity working in refugee response before your next gift. It takes less time than deciding what to have for iftar.
Sources: UNHCR Global Trends Report, 2025. Surah Al-Hashr (59:9). Surah At-Tawbah (9:60). UNHCR zakat guidance and fiqh council statements on refugee zakat eligibility. World Food Programme and OCHA Sudan crisis data, 2025. UNHCR Cox's Bazar situation reports.
