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Is it permissible to give one expiation for an oath (kaffarat yamin) to a poor man to feed ten needy persons in his home, given the uncertainty of how he will divide it?

1 min readAlso available in العربية

It is not permissible to give a single expiation to one needy person. Rather, it must be distributed among ten needy people, as stated in Allah’s words: "So its expiation is the feeding of ten needy people." It is permissible to give one expiation or several expiations to a family consisting of ten poor individuals, but the money for a minor must be given to their guardian. If the family comprises ten needy individuals, all the expiations may be given in a single payment. However, it is preferable to give out the expiations incrementally, such as feeding the family one expiation each day until all expiations are completed, to avoid the differing opinion of some scholars who believe that giving ten needy people more than one expiation on a single day only counts as one expiation.

Summarized from the full answer at Ftawy · reviewed Sep 2, 2026

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