Endowments · a Light

A waqf takes property permanently out of the market

A waqf is founded by a deed that freezes a piece of property forever. Once the deed is registered the thing cannot be sold, given away or inherited, and only its income may be spent, on whatever the founder wrote down: a mosque, a school, a hospital, a fountain, blankets for the poor in winter, feed for stray cats. The founder names the trustee and the rules, and courts enforce them centuries later. The legal starting point is a report in Bukhari and Muslim in which Umar acquires land at Khaybar and is told by the Prophet ﷺ to hold the property itself and give away its produce. By the nineteenth century a large share of the cultivated land in some Ottoman provinces was held this way.

Islamic endowment law

Source · Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, Books of Conditions