Zakat, the annual alms required of all Muslims, is often thought to be an individual duty in which the state is only marginally involved. In Egypt during the Fatimid, Ayyubid and early Mamluk periods, however, various attempts were made to centralize the collection of zakat and place its distribution under the direct supervision of the state. Although the attempt to collect zakat from all Muslims was eventually abandoned, a special category of zakat, that owed by legal orphans (aytam), continued to be the locus of a competitive between the judiciary and the Mamluk state until the end of the Mamluk state in the early 16th century C.E. Control of the orphans’ zakat was jealously guarderded by the Shafi‘i judiciary, who dominated the Mamluk legal system. This, however, did not prevent Hanafi jurists from making several attempts in the 14th century to wrest control over supervising the wealth of orphans from the hands of the Shafi‘is. Mamluk sultans were only dissuaded from granting the Hanafis what they demanded by the collective protest of the Shafi‘is. Why did Hanafis and Shafi’is struggle to control the collection and distribution of orphans’ zakat? What kind of social or material capital did they seek, and how did this struggle over the control of the orphans’ zakat fit into a larger struggle for power over judicial positions and authority in Mamluk Egypt? The evidence from biographical dictionaries, works of legal maxims and the representation of orphans in chronicles from the period all indicate that the significance of the zakat of the orphans was not only in the access to material wealth it promised but was also due to the importance of orphans as symbols of legitimate power and legality. Moreover, fatwas written by prominent Mamluk-era jurists, including ‘Izz al-Din Ibn ‘Abd al-Salam al-Sulami (d. 1262) and Najm al-Din al-Tarasusi (d. 1357), suggest that a primary audience of this debate was the military elite, the umara’, many of whom, according to contemporary chronicles, were responsible for caring for the orphaned children of their deceased comrades in arms. Hanafis like al-Tarasusi argued that their madhhab was preferable for the umara’ because it did not require zakat to be payed at all. By not listening to the Hanafis, the Mamluk sultans made a decision to neglect the interests of their military in order to gain the support of the Shafi‘i legal scholars.