Answer
Wa `alaykum As-Salamu waRahmatullahi wa Barakatuh.
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
In this fatwa:
If the clinic is exclusively for the poor and needy, it is permissible to use zakah for building it
In his response to your question, Prof. Dr. Monzer Kahf, Professor of Islamic Finance and Economics at Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies, states:
If the clinic is exclusively for the poor and needy, it is permissible to use zakah for building it because having a clinic is a necessary vehicle for providing health service including medicines.
I say that knowing that there is another opinion that does not allow it. Here we need to expand the argument a little. Services, health, education, transportation, etc. are part of contemporary life. Services are considered properties in our Shari`ah. So you can buy them and sell them and finance them through Islamic banking and finance. Why not give them on the basis of making the poor own them also as he/she owns physical things when you give him food or cloth.
Allah Almighty knows best.
Editor’s note: This fatwa is from Ask the Scholar’s archive and was originally published at an earlier date.