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Covers Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Guyana and Suriname. South America's Muslims are concentrated
Covers Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Guyana and Suriname. South America's Muslims are concentrated in a few cities — São Paulo, Buenos Aires and the tri-border area — and the region's Zakat life is organised city by city rather than country by country.
Giving runs through mosques, Islamic centres and community associations. There is no South American Zakat fund and no published national total for any country in the region. The larger communities, such as São Paulo's, have mosques and charities with decades of history, but their giving is still community-scale rather than state-scale. Honest note: no single central Zakat collection body or national collection figure was verifiable for any South American country in this guide's sources, so no national total is quoted here.
Honest note: no single South American moon-sighting authority was verifiable for this guide. Communities follow the announcement of their own mosque or Islamic centre, which may in turn follow an announcement from North America, the Gulf or a local sighting. South America spans several time zones and both hemispheres, so a single regional date should never be assumed, and a reader in São Paulo and a reader in Bogotá may legitimately start on different days.
The silver Nisab is 612.36 grams, about US$968 at the 1 November 2026 silver price of US$1.58 per gram. In South America, where inflation has repeatedly eroded local currencies, the weight-based definition is the stable part: the threshold is a weight of silver, not a fixed number of reais or pesos. A payer who memorised last year's converted figure and reused it this year would be using the wrong threshold, which is why this guide's worked example labels its exchange rate as illustrative.
Honest note: no single official Fitrana figure was verifiable for any South American country in this guide's sources. The obligation is one sa' of the local staple food per person, paid before the Eid prayer, and the cash equivalent should be worked out from the local price of rice or flour, or asked of the local mosque or Islamic centre.
All prices and rates in this example are illustrative, not live rates.
A trader in São Paulo holds BRL 20,000 in cash and stock for a full lunar year, with no debts due. Using an illustrative rate of BRL 5.40 per US dollar purely to make the arithmetic visible, the silver Nisab of about US$968 converts to roughly BRL 5,227, so the wealth is well above Nisab and Zakat is due on the whole amount: BRL 20,000 × 2.5% = BRL 500. Use the live exchange rate on the day of payment, not the illustrative rate used here.
Figures are those published for the year stated; always recheck the issuing body's current figure before paying.