1500 Year Old Bible Predicted the Coming of Prophet Mohammed(P.B.U.H)

A 1,500-year-old Bible in which Jesus is believed to have foretold the coming of the Prophet Mohammed to Earth has attracted attention from the Vatican this week.

Pope Benedict XVI has reportedly requested to see the book, which has been hidden in Turkey for the last 12 years, according to the Daily Mail. 

The text, reportedly worth $22 million, is said to contain Jesus’ prediction of the Prophet’s coming but was suppressed by the Christian Church for years for its strong resemblance to the Islamic view of Jesus, Turkish culture and tourism minister Ertugrul Gunay told the newspaper.

“In line with Islamic belief, the Gospel treats Jesus as a human being and not a God. It rejects the ideas of the Holy Trinity and the Crucifixion and reveals that Jesus predicted the coming of the Prophet Mohammed,” the newspaper reported. 

“In one version of the gospel, he is said to have told a priest: ‘How shall the Messiah be called? Mohammed is his blessed name.’

“And in another, Jesus denied being the Messiah, claiming that he or she would be Ishmaelite, the term used for an Arab,” the newspaper added.

According to the report, Muslims claim the text, which many say is the Gospel of Barnabas, is an addition to the original gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John.

St. Barnabas is traditionally identified as the founder of the Cypriot Church, an early Christian later named an apostle.

Gunay said the Vatican has officially requested to see the book, which Turkey had discovered during a police anti-smuggling operation in 2000. 

The gang was reportedly convicted of smuggling various items seized during the operation, including the Bible, and all the artifacts were kept in a safe at an Ankara courthouse. 

It remained closely guarded by authorities before being handed over to the Ankara Ethnography Museum where it will soon be put on show.

A photocopy of a single page from the leather-bound, gold-lettered book, penned in Jesus’ native Aramaic language is reportedly worth about $2.4 million.

But skepticism over the authenticity of the ancient handwritten manuscript has arisen. 

Protestant pastor İhsan Özbek has said this version of the book is said to come from the fifth or sixth century, while St. Barnabas had lived in the first century as one of the Apostles of Jesus.

“The copy in Ankara might have been written by one of the followers of St. Barnabas,” he told the Today Zaman newspaper.

“Since there is around 500 years in between St. Barnabas and the writing of the Bible copy, Muslims may be disappointed to see that this copy does not include things they would like to see … It might have no relation with the content of the Gospel of Barnabas,” Özbek added.

But suspicions could soon be laid to rest. 

The real age of the Bible could soon be determined by a scientific scan, theology professor Ömer Faruk Harman told the Daily Mail, possibly clarifying whether it was written by St. Barnabas or a follower of his. 

Squatting law will only criminalise the homeless. Let's demolish clause 130

The million empty homes in Britain are the real scandal, not the squatting of a tiny number of occupied properties

A new law is racing through the Lords, having passed the Commons. It is called the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, and it contains an infamous clause, which goes by the number 130. If clause 130 passes, squatting an unoccupied residential property will no longer be a civil offence but a criminal one, punishable by a maximum fine of £5,000 – which feels like a joke when tossed at the homeless – or a sentence of up to a year. If the government does jail the homeless for being homeless, the joke surely is – well, they won't be homeless any more.

This government's appetite for criminalising poverty is unslaked. It is, I suppose, a natural psychological response to their policies; once you have demonised your problem, you are not responsible for solving it. Squatters are by definition homeless and, according to the charity Crisis, 40% of single homeless people have squatted. Research also shows that 41% have mental health needs, 34% have been in care, 42% are ill or disabled, and 21% self-harm.

So these are the most fragile of citizens, who have almost always asked for housing and been refused – 78% have been turned away by local authorities because single people are rarely eligible for housing. Criminalisation only increases their vulnerability. Rough sleeping and prostitution may follow, or something worse. Life expectancy is 47 for homeless men, 43 for women.

Some do not last that long. Six years ago I met a homeless woman aged 21 under Waterloo Bridge. Her name was Kimberly Dowling and a month later she was dead and interred in a grave in Kilburn. So who can blame the homeless for squatting? You might even call it using your initiative to improve your situation, a homily Conservatives usually purr at, but not this time.

The government likes this law, and is ready to lie to persuade the public to accept it, possibly because squatting is now associated in the public mind with political activism, and imprisoning your critics is always tempting. It is, in fact, already a criminal offence to squat an occupied home, to access utilities without paying or to commit criminal damage, under the Criminal Law Act of 1977. The tiny number of cases where occupied homes are squatted are swiftly and cheaply resolved if the law is correctly enforced.

Two high-profile cases last year – Julia High, who came home from the Proms to find her house squatted by Romanians, and of Oliver and Kaltun Cockerell, whose home was squatted before they moved in – allowed Conservative MPs to mislead the public and conjure nightmarish visions of violation of their soft furnishings. The housing minister, Grant Shapps, told the BBC that when homes are squatted, the "police don't act because the law does not support the police acting".

The MP Mike Weatherley told the Daily Mail: "If those squatters claim that they did not break into your property – though they almost certainly will have done – you have no powers to throw them out." This is a lie and 160 housing lawyers and academics wrote to the Guardian to say so. There is a problem with enforcement, but that is the fault of the police, not the homeless; the Law Society and the Criminal Bar Association oppose the new law, and even the Metropolitan police thinks the current one is " broadly in the right place". Nor is the public agitated by squatting. When the Ministry of Justice consulted about squatting, 2,126 responses came from "members of the public concerned about the impact of criminalisation" and only 25 were from "members of the public concerned about the harm squatting can cause". The people, as ever, are kinder than their government.

The timing could not be more vicious. The chronic shortage of social housing, the cuts and the economic depression create a perfect storm of a housing crisis. Homelessness is up 15% nationally in the last year, and rough sleeping in London is up 8%. Shapps has promised funding to resolve homelessness but this money is a drop in an ocean of chaos; it will be wiped out by cuts elsewhere.

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer wants to exempt abandoned properties from clause 130. There are nearly 930,000 empty homes in the UK, of which more than 350,000 have been empty for over six months. Now that is a scandal that the government should ponder; in the meantime, we have the victims to punish.

How Cameron's NHS cheats waiting-list figures

A hospital clerk ordered to lie to patients reveals a rampant culture of deviousness in the NHS that forced her to quit

David Cameron and his health secretary, Andrew Lansley, meet nurses during a visit to the Royal Salford Hospital in Manchester in January. Photograph: John Giles/PA

David Cameron blocks his ears to inconvenient NHS truths, conferring only with supporters. Journalists are barred from hearing what staff tell him on his photo-opportunity hospital visits. Tuesday's Guardian poll shows how far he has lost the public trust he tried so hard to win on the NHS.

He should meet Carol, who has just quit after 17 years as a waiting-list clerk. She got in touch to express her disgust at what she was ordered to do. When she protested to a senior manager, he said this was happening around the country, so I won't reveal her hospital, unfairly picking on just one. This foundation trust boasts on its home page: "In these days of patient choice, it is more important than ever before to listen carefully to the views of our patients." But their patients' views might be unprintable if they knew how far political imperatives have overridden and warped medical priorities.

The national target says 90% of patients must be treated within 18 weeks of first referral by a GP. With annual budget cuts of 4% for the next four years, that's a tall order as the NHS undergoes its greatest ever upheaval. Just to survive, the NHS always needs 2.5% above inflation, so most professional observers think it will erupt: already 18-week waits are up 43%. Waiting-list clerks are at the sharp end where the cash crunch meets the impossible target – and here's what Carol says she was ordered to do:

She was told to cancel operations for anyone who was already waiting over 18 weeks, and instead to fill that theatre time with people closest to breaching the 18-week limit. "I was told to call people who had already gone over the 18 weeks and pretend there was no longer theatre time for their operation, and not give them a new date." She was told not to book anyone already in breach until April and the start of the next financial year, or to book only one for every nine still under the target. Instead she was told to fill theatre slots with as many short, minor operations as possible.

Next she was told to use devious means for knocking people off the waiting list. The worst was when she was told to call a mother of three young children to offer her a short-notice slot for Christmas Eve, knowing she would refuse and so could be knocked off the list for refusing. "We would offer operations at very short notice to people getting near the 18-week deadline. You hope they'd say no so you count them as a refusal and knock them off."

She protested first to her line manager, then to the one above and finally to the one above that. "I said I wanted these instructions in writing before I would lie to patients. Of course they said it could never be written down. But the manager in charge of operating theatres said other hospitals were all doing it, so we had to too. There's no other way to stay within target." Did the consultants know? "One complained, really upset at not getting patients seen according to priority of need, but they bullied him and he was told to be quiet. They warned that Monitor inspectors would put us on alert."

Cameron's new ban on mixed-sex wards after a long Daily Mail campaign has made matters far worse. He boasts that mixed-sex wards are now virtually gone. Carol's hospital trust boasts the same on its front page. She says: "Take rheumatology. People come in for one day for injections for pain, with a session once a month. Now it has to be men one month, women the next. Sometimes there might be just four men, say, and the other places are wasted. Many have to wait two months not one month now." This is what happens when political gimmickry is put before health need.

When Labour was driving down waiting times, there were similar stories of gaming and tricks: some A&E departments roped off corners and called them "wards" to keep within a four-hour trolley wait. "There was a bit of it then," Carol says, "but nothing, absolutely nothing, like what's happening now. I started in the early 1990s when there were two-year-long waits, and I've seen them drop so fast in the past 10 years. Now managers are deciding lots of patients are 'not in clinical need'. But a builder who can't work waiting for a hernia operation is in need, isn't he?"

Carol was so shocked she walked away after registering her complaint. In her last weeks she was allowed not to phone her own 18-week waiters and cancel their operations – but, she says, "everyone else still had to do it". "Clinical need is forgotten. It's all about managing the figures now."

Professor John Appleby of the King's Fund health thinktank says he hears of waiting-list cheating from many hospitals and will suggest the National Audit Office investigates. The government on Monday claimed credit for figures showing A&E use is falling due to better GP commissioning. Appleby says it has nothing to do with a GP system not yet in place: the last government began fining A&Es treating too many people, so hospitals now channel more patients straight into annexed GP clinics – good practice, but nonsense figures.

Targets always tempt statistical massaging, but the extremity of this cheating means no waiting-list figures can be trusted. As the NHS enters a period of austerity that the former health secretary Stephen Dorrell says no other OECD health system has tried, honesty is essential. Doctors and managers do their best, but if asked the impossible they must say so openly and transparently. Voters deserve to know the truth. So, whistleblowers, please get in touch.

The paradox of Rick Santorum's conservative beliefs

Santorum's supporters denounce the government's religious interference, but it's their mantra that feels like oppression

Rick Santorum campaigning in Michigan last week. Photograph: James Fassinger

I can't imagine that anyone on the Obama re-election team ever thought they'd be so lucky as to run against Rick Santorum; even now, one senses a kind of incredulous bemusement among when they are asked to respond to the former senator's more strident remarks.

They can rise above Santorum's social conservative mud-slinging without raising a sweat. Last Sunday, Robert Gibbs, an Obama campaign adviser, used Santorum's accusation that the president had a "phony theology" to plea for civility. We have to, Gibbs said, "get rid of this mindset in our politics that, if we disagree, we have to question character and faith," an assertion that appeals to a conviction that most Americans cling to more strongly than any religious affiliation: the right to be left alone.

As I've written before, I think it's Santorum's comfort with judging (and interfering with) the private lives of others that raises the hackles of voters who don't already agree with him. Social conservatives, Santorum chief among them, have tried to paint the administration's support for mandatory coverage of birth control by insurance companies as an imposition of beliefs on its own. When Santorum claims that the policy means that Obama "has reached a new low in this country's history of oppressing religious freedom that we have never seen before," he's relying on American's long-held distrust of government to blind us to real-life workings of the policy he describes. In practice, it's preventing people from using their insurance to cover birth control costs that feels like government interference, on the way to oppression.

The ability to control when and if we have children isn't a luxury anymore, it's a right as fundamental to our understanding of personal freedom that I'm not even sure most voters give it a second thought. Involving insurance companies, and employers, complicates the issue somewhat for some people – but not so much that it makes the president's policy unpopular.

Believing that employer-subsidized birth control is "a new low in oppressing religious freedom" requires perverting the meaning of "religious freedom" such that it actually means "only my religion," a singleness of vision that Americans just don't share.

As a country, we are more tolerant of religious diversity than most clerics of any stripe would prefer: 70% of Americans who claim affiliation with a particular denomination agree that "many religions can lead to eternal life," an admirable expression of broadmindedness but kind of a buzzkill as far as unique selling propositions go.

Santorum is on record supporting his particular flavor of worship as a killer app; mainline Protestants, he's said, are "gone from the world of Christianity as I see it" – the closest we'll get to an admission of his impossibly narrow vision. Almost all of Santorum's opinions on social issues require a kind of intellectual blinders to make sense, some of them might even demand a different set for each eye. He wants to make divorce more difficult but believes marriage is making babies – a set of positions that logically leads to the kind of unhappy families that make people avoid marriage. He is adamant in opposition to abortion but balks at providing women with prenatal care.

These positions are as almost as unpopular as they are nonsensical: Americans' support for same-sex marriage grows year by year, and refusing to pay for indigent women's pre-natal care can lead some pregnant women to abortion.

Santorum is ahead in national polls on the strength of his meaningless wins in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota and, more to the point, not being Mitt Romney. This election cycle has shown again and again that Republican candidates rise in the polls only to sink again once the public gets to know them. Santorum has undeniable appeal: he is passionate, earnest, genuine and eloquent when it comes to his beliefs. Unfortunately, the more people find out about those beliefs, the more they will see not just how different they are, but how the beliefs themselves encourage the suppression of difference, whatever appeals to freedom he might make.

Obama's supporters can only hope that Santorum embraces freedom of expression, when it comes to religion or anything else, as broadly as possible, and keeps talking.

Jeremy Lin row reveals deep-seated racism against Asian Americans

The racist language directed at the NBA Asian American basketball player has been quite something to behold

New York Knicks player Jeremy Lin. Photograph: Adam Hunger/Reuters

Of the many questions that have been asked about the jaw-dropping success of the New York Knicks' Jeremy Lin, who went from a barely known basketball player to one of the most famous athletes in America in a single game, one that has yet to be posed is: what is the connection between Lin and Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's? While that aesthetically beautiful but morally bankrupt film is primarily remembered for Audrey Hepburn's Givenchy wardrobe, it is Rooney's turn as the speech-impaired upstairs neighbour, Mr Yunioshi, that, for me, really gives the movie its true flavour. It's hard to call a film glamorous when it features a white actor playing an Asian stereotype that would put a Tintin cartoon to shame.

Which brings us back to Lin. Lin is an Asian American NBA basketball player, a first-generation son of Taiwanese immigrants and a Harvard graduate, the American dream given athletic form. Until 4 February, few even knew his name, but after that evening's game against the New Jersey Nets, in which he scored 25 points, and his continuing near-superhuman run of form ever since, the whole of New York and the American press entered into a state of "Linsanity" to the point that Lin is trying to trademark the coinage.

There have been high-profile Asian-American athletes before, Michelle Kwan and Tiger Woods being the most obvious. There have also been Asian players in the NBA before, such as the now-retired 7ft 6in Yao Ming. But Lin is the first American in the league of Chinese or Taiwanese descent and this, it turns out, has been a difficult concept for some to grasp.

One shouldn't expect thoughtful sensitivity from professional athletes or the most hysterical wing of the sports media, but the racist language and even flat-out racism directed at Lin has been quite something to behold.

"Chink in the armor" was ESPN's take not once but twice when the Knicks lost a game last week, both as a headline added by ESPN writer Anthony Federico and then as a phrase used by the anchor Max Bretos (Federico has since been fired and Bretos received a 30-day suspension.) Those two muppets look the height of sophisticated decorum compared with Foxsports.com writer Jason Whitlock, whose response to Lin's triumph over the Lakers on Friday night was to tweet "Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple inches of pain tonight", a comment notable for being almost more misogynistic than racist. When the Madison Square Garden Network flashed up a photo of Lin, it superimposed it with a fortune cookie, presumably refraining from adding some chopsticks purely because it didn't have the graphics.

Welterweight Floyd Mayweather has never been a modern-day Emily Post but his tweeted thought on Lin last week – "Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he's Asian. Black players do what he does every night and don't get the praise" – was impressive even by his standards. Also, "don't get the praise"? Come on, Floyd, you came ninth in Dancing with the Stars! How much more praise do you want?

Nor does one need to look to the morons for examples. Chinstroking journal the Atlantic put forward the charming theory that Lin's success is due to his "philosophical heritage" – ah, so! And so inscrutable, too!

Racism in sport is nothing new, as anyone familiar with English football could tell you. But Lin's high-profile success has highlighted a different problem, that of racism against Asian Americans in general. While no one would claim that racism against black people is no longer a problem in America, it is unthinkable that any news network or even half-brained TV presenter would use racial slurs against a black player equivalent to the Asian ones that have been used against Lin. This is because racism against Asians is not confronted as much and therefore is somehow seen as more acceptable – not even racist, even.

A survey last year found that Asian American teenagers suffered far more bullying at school than any other demographic: 54% of Asian-American teenagers reported being bullied compared with 31.3% of white teens and 38.4% of black ones. In an extraordinary article in New York magazine last year, Wesley Yang wrote that to be an Asian American means being not just part of a "barely distinguishable" mass of "people who are good at math and play the violin, but a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally".

Asian Americans are, without question, barely represented culturally. Black roles in Hollywood are still by and large limited to maids, drug dealers and James Earl Jones, but Asian roles are invariable limited to camp villains, martial arts experts, dippy shop owners and exchange students soundtracked with a gong.

So the answer to what connects Mickey Rooney and Jeremy Lin is that both reveal a side of America that even this most racially aware country tends to ignore. The difference is that Rooney encouraged those stereotypes, Lin overturns them, yet the response remains the same.

We need to know who funds these thinktank lobbyists

The battle for democracy is becoming a fight against backroom billionaires seeking to shape politics to suit their own interests

Consultant Frank Luntz's technique was pioneered by tobacco firms: teach the ‘controversy' in schools. Photograph: Jeffrey Blackler / Alamy/Alamy

Shocking, fascinating, entirely unsurprising: the leaked documents, if authentic, confirm what we suspected but could not prove. The Heartland Institute, which has helped lead the war against climate science in the United States, is funded among others by tobacco firms, fossil fuel companies and one of the billionaire Koch brothers.

It appears to have followed the script written by a consultant to the Republican party, Frank Luntz, in 2002. "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."

Luntz's technique was pioneered by the tobacco companies and the creationists: teach the controversy. In other words, insist that the question of whether cigarettes cause lung cancer, natural selection drives evolution, or burning fossil fuels causes climate change, is still wide open, and that both sides of the "controversy" should be taught in schools and thrashed out in the media.

The leaked documents appear to show that, courtesy of its multimillionaire donors, the institute has commissioned a global warming curriculum for schools which teaches that "whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy" and "whether CO₂ is a pollutant is controversial".

The institute has claimed it is "a genuinely independent source of research and commentary" and that "we do not take positions in order to appease or avoid losing support from individual donors". But the documents, if authentic, reveal that its attacks on climate science have been largely funded by a single anonymous donor and that "we are extinguishing primarily global warming projects in pace with declines in his giving".

The climate change deniers it funds have made similar claims to independence. For example, last year Fred Singer told a French website: "Of course I am not funded by the fossil fuel lobbies. It's a completely absurd invention." The documents suggest that the institute, funded among others by the coal company Murray Energy, the the oil company Marathon and the former Exxon lobbyist Randy Randol has been paying him $5,000 a month.

Robert Carter has claimed he "receives no research funding from special interest organisations". But the documents suggest that Heartland pays him $1,667 a month. Among the speakers at its conferences were two writers for the Telegraph (Christopher Booker and James Delingpole). The Telegraph group should now reveal whether and how much they were paid by the Heartland Institute.

It seems to be as clear an illustration as we have yet seen of the gulf between what such groups call themselves and what they really are. Invariably, organisations arguing for regulations to be removed, top taxes to be reduced and other such billionaire-friendly policies, call themselves free-market or conservative thinktanks. But according to David Frum, formerly a fellow at one such group – the American Enterprise Institute – they "increasingly function as public relations agencies". The message they send to their employees, he says, is "we don't pay you to think, we pay you to repeat".

The profits of polluting or reckless companies and banks and the vast personal fortunes of their beneficiaries are largely dependent on the regulations set by governments. This is why the "thinktanks" campaign for small government. If regulations robustly defend the public interest, the profits decline. If they are weak, the profits rise. Billionaires and big business buy influence to insulate themselves from democratic control. It seems to me that the so-called thinktanks are an important component of this public relations work.

Their funding, in most cases, is opaque. When I challenged some of the most prominent of such groups in the UK, only one would reveal its donors' identity. The others refused. Disgracefully, their lack of accountability does not prevent some of them from registering as charities and claiming tax exemption.

The Charity Commission in England and Wales – negligent, asleep at the wheel – is becoming a threat to democracy. These organisations are not trying to restore historic buildings or rescue distressed donkeys. They are seeking to effect political change in highly contentious areas. The minimum requirement for all such groups – whether they are on the left or on the right – is that they should disclose their major sources of income so that we know on whose behalf they speak. The commission is providing cover for multimillionaires and corporations who are funding undisclosed campaigns to enhance their own wealth under the guise of charity, and obliging the rest of us to pay for it through tax exemptions. If that's charity, a police siren is music.

The use of so-called thinktanks on both sides of the Atlantic seems to me to mirror the use of super-political action committees (superPACs) in the US. Since the supreme court removed the limits on how much one person could give to a political campaign, the billionaires have achieved almost total control over politics. An article last week on TomDispatch revealed that in 2011, just 196 donors provided nearly 80% of the money raised by superPACs.

The leading Republican candidates have all but abandoned the idea of mobilising popular support. Instead they use the huge funds they raise from billionaires to attack the credibility of their opponents through television ads. Yet more money is channelled through 501c4 groups – tax-exempt bodies supposedly promoting social welfare – which (unlike the superPACs) don't have to reveal the identity of their donors. TomDispatch notes that "serving as a secret slush fund for billionaires evidently now qualifies as social welfare."

The money wins. This is why Republicans swept up so many seats in the mid-term elections, and why the surviving Democrats were scarcely distinguishable from their rivals. It is why Obama, for all his promise, appears incapable of governing in the public interest. What can he tell the banks: "Do what I say or I won't take your money any more"? How can he tax the billionaires when they have their hands around his throat? Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

This is plutocracy, pure and simple. The battle for democracy is now a straight fight against the billionaires and corporations reshaping politics to suit their interests. The first task of all democrats must be to demand that any group, of any complexion, seeking to effect political change should reveal its funders.

He has a dagger and a revolver – is there any zakaah on them?

My father has a dagger and a licensed revolver. I want to ask: is there any zakaah due on them?.

Praise be to Allaah.

No zakaah is required of a person for what he owns of weapons, animals, clothing and the like, unless it is for trade. The evidence for that is the words of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him): “No zakaah is due from the Muslim for his slave or his horse.” Narrated by Muslim (982). 

Al-Nawawi (may Allaah have mercy on him) said: This hadeeth is the basis of the principle that no zakaah is due on one’s own property, and no zakaah is due on horses and slaves if they are not for trade. End quote from Sharh Muslim. 

One's own wealth means that which a person keeps to make use of and benefit from, not for purposes of trade. On this basis, no zakaah is due on the dagger and revolver, unless they are prepared for sale, in which case zakaah is due on them. See also the answer to question no. 65515 for information on how to pay zakaah on trade goods. 

It should be noted that the dagger may be made of silver or plated with gold. If the gold or silver in it reaches the nisaab (minimum threshold) then zakaah is due on it; or if it is less than the nisaab but the owner has other gold or silver that reaches the nisaab when put together with it, then zakaah is also due on it. 

But if the gold or silver in it is less than the nisaab and the owner has no other gold or silver, then no zakaah is due on it. 

The scholars of the Standing Committee were asked: is a personal weapon such as a rifle, revolver or sword subject to zakaah, and how should it be paid? 

They replied: 

No zakaah is due on that because it is not prepared for trade. But if there is any gold on the sword etc that reaches the nisaab by itself or when added to other gold that he owns, then he must pay zakaah, according to the more correct of the two scholarly opinions, as is the case with jewellery. End quote. 

Fataawa al-Lajnah al-Daa’imah (9/276) 

And Allaah knows best.