Until the 1920s, no one made a serious attempt to count the number of Muslim endowments in India. Between 1920 and the present several provincial and all-India laws came on the statute books which required custodians of awqaf to register their institutions with government supported agencies. Such legislation generally fails to command full compliance of the individuals concerned and even today no one seems to have a precise idea of the number of endowments in the subcontinent. Likewise, the number in operation during the British period remains uncertain. At present, about 100,000 are registered with the Indian government. If reports from officials, custodians and founders are correct, the effect of those laws passed over the past fifty years is to discourage the creation of awqaf. Therefore, many of those currently existing date from the British period. Though exceedingly vague, a safe guess is that several tens of thousands of endowments were founded during the British period.

For this study we selected a total of forty endowments. Availability of information in legal archives was the primary reason for selection. Another twenty-five lawsuits dealing with allied questions of inheritance, debt and family relations supplemented material drawn from them. Obviously, forty was too small a sample to develop statistical arguments about India's Muslims as a whole. Even so, each endowment had a story to tell about the people who founded it and whose lives were affected by its existence. The material collected from them was suggestive rather than statistically conclusive, They spoke of the way in which their founders thought of themselves, of the values they professed and the problems they faced.