Waqf
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A waqf (Arabic: وقف, plural Arabic: اوقاف, awqāf; Turkish: vakıf) is an inalienable religious endowment in Islam, typically devoting a building or plot of land for Muslim religious or charitable purposes. It is conceptually similar to the common law trust.
Awqaf were among the most important owners of property in the Islamic world until recent times, and remain significant. Their incomes support the upkeep of many mosques; in past times, charitable services such as hospitals and orphanages were often maintained by awqaf.
The practice of declaring property as waqf gained considerable currency due to the practice in many Muslim states of expropriating the properties of important persons, especially officials, when they died or were disgraced. By declaring his estate as waqf and his descendants as trustees, a rich man could provide an income for his surviving family.
The Muslim administrative body responsible for the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem is often referred to as "the waqf".
[edit] Under the Ottoman Empire in the Seventeenth Century
The seventeenth-century brought sweeping changes to the Ottoman sultanate, transforming the office's power from active reigning to legitimizing ruling. Where before sultans directed the policies of the state, more and more they merely gave authority to administrative orders. Powerful families began to direct the empire's affairs, and often served in official capacities as gran viziers. The new "civilian oligarchy"Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922 controlled significant individual wealth, including tax farms that had been bought in auctions from the state as well as "illegal seizures of state lands."
In this context, waqf were used sometimes for their expressed pious purposes, in which case money set aside for the foundations would flow upon the donor's dealth. When used in this mode, waqf "played a vital role in the economic life of Ottoman and other Islamic societies" as the often chief source of funding for critical public institutions such as mosques, madrasas (and their students), shelters, orphanages, and cultural centers. The revenue often sustained itself, as in a modern endowment, if it were in the form of land or a shop or tax farm.
Nevertheless, waqf gained negative state attention as a vessel of hereditary money laundering by which the revenues were set aside in name for a foundation but actually passed to the next generation in a family. In this way, vizier and pasha families solidified themselves at the top of a hierarchical chain, one which in principle included the meritocracy created by the devshirme system of recruiting western Christian children to become soldiers (janissaries) and even bureaucratic leaders.
The defining feature of waqfs' righteousness ironically allowed for their corruption. Because of the traditional and well-guarded (by the ulama) standing of Islamic Law in the Ottoman empire, pious foundations were protected from confiscation. "Thus, they offered a revenue source that was secure in a way that wealth from timars or tax farms could never be,"Quataert, supra because unlike tax farms and timars, waqf derived not from the state but from individuals. In theory still the servants of the sultan, elite individuals in the seventeenth century gained financial autonomy with their corruption of waqfs by endowing un-seizable property and establishing hereditary wealth. Increasingly, as pious foundations slipped from the fist of the sultanate, the ulama and independent viziers gained relgious legitimacy. As a result, power gradually shifted with the lessening of the sultan's authority from the sultanate to these new economic and political fixtures.
[edit] See also
- Islamic Law of waqf according to Five Islamic schools of jurisprudence
- Islamic Law According to Five schools of jurisprudence
- [Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922, pp. 37-53 (Cambridge University Press, 2000)]
- [Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, Second Edition (Cambridge University Press, 2002)]
[edit] External links
- Islamic law concerning waqf (Public Trust).[1]
- Encyclopaedia of the Orient article on waqf
- The Hoda Center in Gainesville, FL is also known (lovingly) as "The Waqf"
- Es Seyyid Osman Hulûsi Efendi Waqf in Darende, in Turkiye.
