Held in Trust

Frederic W. Maitland, the so-called father of English legal history, declared that the trust ‘perhaps forms the most distinctive achievement of English lawyers. It seems to us essential to civilization, and yet there is nothintg quite like it in foreign law’. An Anglo-American legal scholar, G. P. Verbit, in his recently published translation of a ninth-century Islamic treatise on the law of trusts, or waqfs, noted that ‘Maitland was wrong ... ... There was, and is, an almost identical institution in Islamic law, the waqf’ which ‘pre-existed the English trust by at least five hundred years’. This remark, like the present volume, is a reminder that our awareness, or recovery, of Islamic history, thus remains a footnote to the history of the West. An excellent addition to the extensive literature on waqfs, this volume provides careful histories of the institution, covering various regions in the Muslim world from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries. Consisting of nine contributions, an introduction, and a conclusion, it is based on papers presented at a seminar on the history of waqf, organized in 2005 at the American University of Cairo. The editor contributes a thoughtful introduction, where she sums up her view on the volume’s overall import: ‘[I]t is immediately clear that general statements about Qur’anic inheritance rules imposing a certain division of wealth upon individuals, restricting their free will, fragmenting wealth, and preventing accumulation, are utterly unfounded: the deeds represent a trace of individuals’ concrete, deliberate strategies for the preservation or transmission of wealth’ (p. 3). This serves as a historically grounded critique of broad theses that have seen recent incarnations in influential titles such as Timur Kuran’s The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (2012) that associate the Muslim world’s ‘backwardness’ or ‘divergence’ to absence of capitalism, and the latter to the presence of waqfs and Qurʾānic inheritance laws. More specifically, ‘waqf had no intrinsic impact: its consequences depended purely on the uses to which social actors put it’ (p. 11). This modest assessment of the functions of such a ubiquitous institution may not itself be persuasive, but the attendant invitation to focus on the diversity of uses this institution was put to as demonstrated by concrete examples is

Business · Islam · Political science · Theology · Waqf · Education and Islamic Studies · Islamic Finance and Banking Studies · Islamic Studies and History · Philosophy