God’s Property pdf download

God’s Property – Islam, Charity, and the Modern State

Nada Moumtaz

GOD’S PROPERTY – ISLAM, CHARITY, AND THE MODERN STATE

Book’s Introduction

When founding waqfs, founders surrender the ownership of possessions to God, dedicating their revenues to charity in perpetuity.2

Land and buildings or parts thereof are the most common kinds of waqfs. Besides their many worldly advantages, waqfs bring Muslims closer to God in the hereafter and continue to do so as long as waqf revenues serve charitable purposes.3 In the archive of the Muslim Sunni court in Beirut, I had noticed a surge in waqf foundations starting in the 1990s, after a fifty-year lull.

I was discussing these new waqfs with founders, administrators, officials, and scholars, but we continually debated: Could these waqfs be sold, or were they inalienable? Did they need to involve a rent-yielding asset, or could they just create a legal entity? Were waqfs simply nonprofits? the debates were endless.

It is true that I had my own preconceptions. Vaguely familiar with the waqf from growing up in Beirut, I was returning home in September 2007, after four years of coursework in anthropology; and since anthropological studies of contemporary waqfs were few, I had mostly read historical and legal studies of waqf and learned about the many forms that waqfs had taken in Islamic history.4

In the Ottoman Empire, which included Beirut from the sixteenth into the early twentieth century,5 when the French Mandate was imposed (1920–1943), the most visible waqfs included institutions and