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Chapter 18 - Ottoman Fatwās on the Substitution of Defunct Endowment Properties, from al-Aqwāl al-Marḍiyya of Qāḍīzādah Muḥammad Ṭāhir (d. 1254/1834)

from Part III - Legal Opinions (Fatwās)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2024

By
Hatice Kübra Kahya
Edited by
Omar Anchassi  and
Robert Gleave
Omar Anchassi
Affiliation:
Universität Bern, Switzerland
Robert Gleave
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Summary

This chapter explores the intervention of the late-18th century Ottoman jurist Kadizâda Mehmed Tâhir in a longstanding controversy: the legitimacy of istibdāl (the exchange of an endowed property for cash, or for another property). This mechanism was recognised as valid by the Ḥanbalī school of law, somewhat exceptionally. Istibdāl was an important means of reviving defunct endowments (sing. waqf) whose properties no longer generated the income necessary to support the charitable causes they had been devoted to, as well as a means of ensuring the continued circulation of property in society. Kadizâda Mehmed Tâhir argued in favour of the legitimacy of this mechanism and sought to uphold the decision of a Cairene deputy judge of the Ḥanbalī school who permitted istibdāl in a case where the endowment deed (waqfiyya) explicitly precluded its use.

Keywords

Endowment (waqf)Endowment substitution (istibdāl)Endowment deed (waqfiyya)Real estatePropertyCashJudiciary.
Type
Chapter
Information
Islamic Law in Context
A Primary Source Reader
 , pp. 194 - 203
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Primary Sources

Ṭāhir, Qāḍīzādah Muḥammad. ‘al-Aqwāl al-Marḍiyya fī Fatāwā al-Aqṭār al-Miṣriyya’, Süleymaniye Library, Hacı Mahmud Efendi, 1073.Google Scholar

Secondary Sources

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Mandaville, Jon E. ‘Usurious Piety: The Cash Waqf Controversy in the Ottoman Empire’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 10 (1979), 289–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nahal, Galal H. The Judicial Administration of Ottoman Egypt in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1979).Google Scholar
Peters, Rudolph. ‘What Does it Mean to be an Official Madhhab? Hanafism and the Ottoman Empire’, in The Islamic School of Law: Evolution, Devolution, and Progress, ed. Bearman, P., Peters, R. and Vogel, F. E. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 147–58; repr. in Rudolph Peters, Shariʿa, Justice and Legal Order, Egyptian and Islamic Law: Selected Essays (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 585–99.Google Scholar

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