Waqf: The Islamic Alternative to Capitalist Public Infrastructure

Hamza Ansari

— 24 min read

"You will never attain righteousness until you spend from what you love. And whatever you spend — Allah is surely aware of it."
— Surah Al-Imran, 3:92

Introduction

Ask an ordinary Muslim today what a waqf is, and you will likely get a blank stare. Ask the same person about the concept of a "non-profit," and they will have something to say. This inversion — that we can speak fluently about Western legal vehicles while having forgotten the institutional backbone of classical Islamic civilization — is itself part of what needs to be explained.

For nearly a thousand years, Islamic societies funded the institutions we now take for granted — hospitals, universities, primary schools, libraries, public fountains, soup kitchens, hostels for travelers, and mosques themselves — through an institution called waqf (plural: awqaf). A waqf is an endowment of property, legally "frozen" in perpetuity, whose revenue supports a designated charitable purpose. Once declared waqf, an asset can never be sold, inherited, or gifted. It exists outside the market. It serves its beneficiaries — often the poor, the sick, students, travelers — until the end of time.

The story of the waqf is not just a story about charitable giving. It is a story about how a civilization can structure its public infrastructure to resist capture by the wealthy. It is a story about a legal institution explicitly designed to prevent what has happened to Medicare, to public education funding, and to the American tax-exempt religious sector — namely, the siphoning of public goods into private pockets while preserving the appearance of charitable purpose. Understanding waqf is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is an exercise in recovering a vocabulary for an alternative.

What Is a Waqf?

The word waqf literally means "to stop" or "to hold back." The legal meaning derives from this: to hold property back from circulation in the market, and to commit its revenue to a specified beneficiary. A person (the waqif) dedicates an asset — typically land, a building, agricultural produce, or in some views cash — and stipulates how its proceeds shall be used. A trustee (mutawalli or nazir) administers the endowment, preserving the corpus (hubs al-asl) while distributing the usufruct (tasbil al-manfa'ah) to the designated beneficiaries.

Three structural features distinguish waqf from virtually every Western charitable vehicle:

First, irrevocability. Once an asset is declared waqf, it leaves the founder's ownership permanently. The founder cannot change their mind. The founder's heirs cannot contest it. No court can sell it to settle a debt. This is not a technicality — it is the heart of the institution. Waqf assets are legally removed from the sphere of commodification [1].

Second, preservation of the corpus. Only the yield or usufruct of the waqf is distributed — never the underlying asset itself. If the waqf is a field of date palms, the dates are given in charity; the field itself continues to produce. If the waqf is a rental building, the rent funds the beneficiary; the building itself is maintained but never sold [2]. This preserves the institution's productive capacity across generations.

Third, binding designation of beneficiaries. The waqif specifies who benefits and for what purpose, and the trustee is legally bound to that designation. A waqf for a hospital is a waqf for a hospital — not for the trustee's salary, not for his family, not for anything else. The shari'ah courts historically enforced these designations strictly.

The legal instrument embodying all of this is the waqfiyya — a written endowment deed that names the founder, describes the property, specifies the beneficiaries, appoints the trustee, and lays out operational rules. Thousands of these deeds survive in archives across the Muslim world, forming one of the richest records of institutional continuity in human history.

Two categories of waqf developed in classical fiqh. Public or charitable waqf (waqf khayri) is dedicated to a public purpose — a mosque, a school, a hospital, the poor, travelers, orphans. Family waqf (waqf ahli or waqf dhurri) designates the founder's descendants as beneficiaries, usually until a specified lineage ends, after which the revenue reverts to a charitable purpose. The waqf ahli is the historically more controversial form, and we will return to it.

Quran, Hadith, and Classical Foundations

The institution of waqf is not explicitly named in the Quran, but its spiritual foundation is unmistakable. The ayah quoted at the opening of this article — "You will never attain righteousness until you spend from what you love" (Al-Imran 3:92) — is the classical scholarly anchor for the practice. When this verse was revealed, Abu Talha al-Ansari (may Allah be pleased with him), who owned the most beloved of his properties, a garden called Bayruha facing the Prophet's Mosque in Madinah, came to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and offered it as charity. The Prophet ﷺ approved and advised him to give it to his relatives (this hadith is in both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, muttafaq alayhi) [3]. This is one of the first recorded instances of the practice that would later be codified as waqf.

The foundational hadith of waqf, however, is the Khaybar land hadith — narrated by Ibn Umar and recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari (no. 2737, sahih). Umar ibn al-Khattab (may Allah be pleased with him) acquired a piece of land in Khaybar and came to the Prophet ﷺ seeking counsel on what to do with it. The Prophet ﷺ replied that, if he wished, he could hold the principal (habbasta aslaha) and give its fruits in charity. Umar then made the land inalienable, stipulating in the terms that it not be sold, gifted, or inherited, with its yield distributed to the poor, to kin, to slaves seeking manumission, to the cause of Allah, to travelers, and to guests [4].

This hadith establishes every essential feature of waqf: the binding nature of the dedication, the preservation of the corpus, the designation of multiple beneficiary categories, and the legitimate role of a trustee who may consume from the waqf reasonably without accumulating wealth from it. A separate narration in Bukhari (no. 2313) clarifies that Ibn Umar himself later administered his father's waqf and could share from it with guests, provided he did so without seeking personal enrichment [5].

A second foundational hadith, also in Bukhari and al-Nasa'i, is that of Uthman ibn Affan (may Allah be pleased with him) and the Well of Rumah. When the Prophet ﷺ arrived in Madinah, the only source of sweet water was a well owned by a private individual who sold its water. The Prophet ﷺ said that whoever purchased it and made its water free for the Muslims would have a house in Paradise. Uthman bought it and endowed it for public use. The well, in principle, still exists in Madinah to this day — a waqf functioning for over fourteen hundred years [6].

A third text commonly cited as establishing the rationale for waqf is the hadith of continuous charity (sadaqah jariyah), narrated by Abu Hurayra in Sahih Muslim: when a person dies, their deeds cease except for three — continuous charity, beneficial knowledge, or a righteous child who prays for them. Waqf is the paradigmatic form of sadaqah jariyah: charity that continues to flow long after the donor's death, earning them reward for as long as the institution serves its purpose [7].

The Classical Scholarly Tradition

On the back of these texts, Islamic jurisprudence developed one of the most sophisticated endowment law traditions in human history. The earliest systematic treatise devoted to waqf is Ahkam al-Awqaf by al-Khassaf (d. 261 AH / 874 CE), a Hanafi jurist whose work laid the foundational vocabulary for the field. On the Hanbali side, Ibn Qudama al-Maqdisi (d. 620 AH / 1223 CE) treated waqf in exhaustive detail in his magnum opus al-Mughni — a comparative fiqh encyclopedia that lays out the Hanbali position while engaging the views of the other madhabs [8]. Ibn Qudama's treatment of waqf, covering its conditions, rulings on movable versus immovable property, the rights and duties of the mutawalli, and the rules for what can and cannot be stipulated, remains a primary reference for Sunni scholars to this day.

Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728 AH / 1328 CE) and his student Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 751 AH / 1350 CE) — both Hanbalis, though independent-minded — addressed waqf extensively in their fatwas. Ibn Taymiyya's Majmu' al-Fatawa dedicates an entire volume (Volume 31) to endowments and related topics [9]. A distinctive feature of their approach is a greater emphasis on the founder's intent (qasd al-waqif) and the principle of maslahah (public benefit) in interpreting ambiguous waqf stipulations — a jurisprudential sensibility that would prove important when circumstances changed and rigid interpretations threatened to defeat the founder's original charitable purpose.

The Four Madhabs on Waqf

The four Sunni schools agree on waqf's legitimacy and basic structure, but they differ on three important points — and one of these disagreements tells us something profound about how the institution developed.

The first and most historically consequential disagreement concerns whether waqf is binding and irrevocable. Imam Abu Hanifa (d. 150 AH / 767 CE) originally held that waqf was not binding — a founder could, in principle, revoke it and return the property to their ownership or their heirs. He treated it analogously to a loan ('ariyah) that could be recalled [10]. This was a minority position within his own madhab. His two most senior students — Imam Abu Yusuf and Imam Muhammad al-Shaybani — disagreed and held that waqf is binding and irrevocable once declared [11]. The Hanafi madhab as it subsequently developed adopted the position of the two students against the founder of the school. This is a striking illustration of how the madhabs function: a founder's early opinion can be overruled by his own students when the evidence warrants, and the madhab continues under the better-grounded position. The Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali schools all hold that waqf is binding from inception. The binding character of waqf — the feature that makes it structurally different from a revocable charitable trust — is therefore near-universal across the Sunni tradition.

The second disagreement concerns whether movable property can be made waqf. Abu Hanifa held that only immovable property (land, buildings) could be waqf, reasoning that fungible or perishable items cannot serve the permanence that waqf requires. Abu Yusuf and al-Shaybani again dissented and permitted movables in certain contexts — livestock, farming tools, books, weapons endowed for the cause of Allah. The Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali schools generally permit waqf of movables, though with varying conditions [12].

The third disagreement concerns cash waqf (waqf al-nuqud). This was contested in classical fiqh because cash is fungible and consumed in use — it seems to violate the principle that the corpus must be preserved. Imam Zufar (Hanafi) and some later Ottoman jurists, most notably Ebussuud Efendi, permitted cash waqf on the grounds that the cash could be invested and the returns given in charity, preserving the effective corpus [13]. This is a legitimate classical minority position, but it is also the door through which most of the financialization problems of modern waqf revival enter — a topic for a separate future article.

On the core features of waqf — its irrevocability, the preservation of the corpus, the binding force of the founder's stipulations, the duties of the trustee, the protection of beneficiaries — the four madhabs are essentially aligned. The disagreements are at the margins.

Waqf as Public Infrastructure: A Historical Survey

The claim that waqf served as the public infrastructure of Islamic civilization is not rhetorical. By the early nineteenth century, more than half of all arable land in the Ottoman Empire was classified as waqf — approximately 75% in present-day Turkey, one-third in Tunisia and Greece, one-half in Algeria, one-fifth in Egypt, and one-seventh in Iran [14]. These were not marginal endowments. They were the productive base on which schools, hospitals, mosques, and welfare institutions were funded.

A brief survey across five eras illustrates the scale and continuity of the institution.

The Abbasid Era (8th–13th centuries)

The Abbasid capital of Baghdad hosted one of the great hospital complexes of the medieval world: Bimaristan al-Adudi, founded in 981 CE by 'Adud al-Dawla, the Buyid prince who ruled in the name of the Abbasid caliph. The hospital was funded through endowments of surrounding properties that generated revenue for the institution's operations in perpetuity [15]. It was a teaching hospital, dividing patients by disease type into specialized wards — a medical innovation — employing 24 and later 28 physicians, including some of the leading medical figures of the era. Care was free, funded entirely from waqf revenue. Jewish and Christian physicians taught alongside Muslim ones. The hospital operated for nearly three hundred years until the Mongol destruction of Baghdad in 1258.

Even earlier, Ibn Tulun's al-Fustat Hospital in Egypt (872 CE) is believed to be the first hospital in history endowed by waqf as its primary financial model. Beyond medicine, it housed a library of approximately 100,000 books, offered treatment for mental disorders (unprecedented in the medieval world), and provided all care free of charge. It operated for approximately 600 years [16]. Consider what this represents: an institution that served the sick of Cairo for six centuries, sustained not by a state budget vulnerable to political upheaval but by a legal instrument that protected its revenue stream from any single ruler's discretion.

Under Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk (d. 485 AH / 1092 CE), the Abbasid period also saw the systematization of higher education through the Nizamiyya madrasas. These institutions — established in Baghdad, Nishapur, Isfahan, Basra, Mosul, Herat, and elsewhere — were funded through waqf endowments that provided not only the physical facilities but also free tuition, free meals, free lodging, and stipends for students [17]. The Nizamiyya of Baghdad, founded around 1065 CE, had approximately 3,000 students by the end of the eleventh century. Among its faculty was Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. Students from modest backgrounds could pursue the highest levels of religious scholarship without debt, because the waqf funded everything.

The Andalusian and Maghribi Traditions (9th century onwards)

In Fez, Morocco, in the year 859 CE, Fatima al-Fihri — the daughter of a wealthy merchant who had migrated from Qayrawan — used her inheritance to establish the Qarawiyyin Mosque and educational complex. Her sister Mariam founded the nearby Andalusian Mosque in the same period. The Qarawiyyin developed into what UNESCO and most historians recognize as the oldest continuously operating university in the world, predating Bologna by over two centuries and Oxford by nearly three [18]. It was sustained through waqf funding from its founder, subsequent sultans, alumni, and individual donors, and housed a library that by the 14th century contained over 30,000 volumes.

The institutional model is striking: a private woman of means, acting within the waqf framework, endows an institution that educates the Muslim world's leading scholars — including Ibn Khaldun and Moses Maimonides, by traditional report — for over a millennium. Across al-Andalus and the Maghrib, similar patterns repeated. Cordoba at its height reportedly housed fifty hospitals, all funded through waqf [19]. The continuity of these institutions, sustained through dynastic changes, invasions, and political upheaval, is a direct function of the legal structure that protected them.

The Ayyubid Era (12th–13th centuries)

The Ayyubid sultan Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi — the Saladin of European memory — used waqf systematically as both religious and political infrastructure. After consolidating control of Egypt and displacing the Shi'i Fatimid dynasty, he established a network of Sunni madrasas, ribats (Sufi hostels), and charitable institutions, converting properties formerly held by his political opponents into endowments for Sunni religious and educational institutions [20]. His al-Salahiyya madrasa in Jerusalem, established after the liberation of the city from the Crusaders in 1187, was an early example of his endowment policy. In Cairo, he founded the al-Nasiri hospital. The endowment deeds (waqfiyyat) from these institutions, some of which survive, specify detailed operational rules.

This period also saw Nur al-Din Zengi in Damascus establish the Bimaristan al-Nuri (1154 CE), a hospital whose quality of care so impressed Salah al-Din — who was treated there himself during an illness in Syria — that he later modeled his Cairo hospital after it [21]. The Nur al-Din Bimaristan operated for approximately seven hundred years and still stands today as a museum of Arab-Islamic medicine.

The Mamluk Era (13th–16th centuries)

The Mamluk era represents, in some ways, the architectural and institutional peak of the classical waqf system. Mamluk sultans and amirs constructed enormous complexes — integrated multi-purpose compounds that combined a mosque, madrasa, hospital, soup kitchen, public fountain, and mausoleum under a single waqf endowment.

The crown jewel of this era is the Qalawun Complex (1284–1285 CE) in Cairo — commissioned by Sultan al-Mansur Qalawun, built in a remarkable fourteen months, and comprising a mausoleum, a madrasa teaching all four Sunni schools of law and medicine, and the Bimaristan al-Mansuri — the largest hospital of its time [22]. The hospital had a reported capacity of 8,000 beds. Its annual waqf revenue was one million dirhams. It treated approximately 4,000 patients daily, free of charge. It served men and women in separate wards. It treated mental illness with music therapy. Upon discharge, patients received food and money to compensate for wages lost during recovery. The hospital operated for over six hundred years, treating patients into the late Ottoman period [23].

Consider what this represents relative to modern American healthcare. An institution that, for six centuries, provided free care to 4,000 patients per day — regardless of religion, citizenship, or social class — funded not by taxation and not by insurance premiums, but by a legal instrument that placed revenue-generating property permanently outside the market. The hospital could not be bought. It could not be sold. It could not be acquired by private equity. It could not be defunded by a change in administration. The waqfiyya protected it.

The Ottoman Era (14th–20th centuries)

The Ottoman Empire systematized and scaled the waqf institution to unprecedented levels. Imperial waqfs founded by sultans, their wives, and high state officials operated as parallel infrastructures to the formal state — providing healthcare, education, food distribution, water fountains, bridges, roads, and lodging for travelers across the empire.

The Sulaymaniye Complex in Istanbul, commissioned by Sultan Sulayman the Magnificent and completed in 1557 under the architect Mimar Sinan, represents the high-water mark of Ottoman imperial waqf architecture. The complex includes four madrasas teaching the four schools of Islamic law, a school of hadith, a medical school (the first formal institutionalized medical training in Ottoman history), a primary school, a hospital, a soup kitchen (imaret), a hospice for travelers, a public bath, an inn, and rows of shops whose rental income funded the whole operation [24]. Sultan Sulayman endowed the complex with vast agricultural properties whose revenues sustained it for centuries. It provided free education, free healthcare, and free food distribution to anyone in need, without regard to social status. It continues to operate as a mosque and monument today.

His wife, Hürrem Sultan, established her own waqf — the Haseki Sultan Complex in Jerusalem — in 1552, which included a mosque, a 55-room pilgrim hospice, an inn, and a soup kitchen. This complex, along with its related waqfs, serviced 26 villages, maintained shops, flour mills, soap factories, and bathhouses in Ottoman Syria and Lebanon, and its revenues funded food distribution and religious services for centuries [25]. Women — often overlooked in this discussion — were major waqf founders in the Ottoman period. Approximately 30% of the fountains of Istanbul that survived into the 1930s were originally endowed by women.

By the nineteenth century, the scale had become staggering. In Cairo, there were approximately 75 madrasas. In Damascus, 51. In Aleppo, the number of madrasas ran into the hundreds. All of them operated on waqf endowments [26].

The Capitalist Alternative: Extraction by Design

To understand what the waqf institution prevents, one has only to examine how capitalism has arranged American public infrastructure — specifically, healthcare and tax-exempt religious institutions. The comparison is not flattering.

Medicare Advantage: Siphoning Care from the Poor and Elderly

The Medicare program was established in 1965 to provide healthcare to elderly and disabled Americans, funded through payroll taxes and general revenues. Medicaid, established the same year, serves the poor. Together, they represent the largest single commitment of American public funds to healthcare for the vulnerable.

Medicare Advantage (MA) is a private-insurance variant of Medicare introduced in the 1990s. Under MA, the federal government pays a private insurer a fixed monthly amount per enrollee, and the insurer manages the enrollee's care. The program was sold as a way to save taxpayers money by introducing market efficiency. The opposite has happened.

In 2026, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) — the independent federal body that advises Congress on Medicare — projects that MA insurers will be overpaid by approximately $76 billion, roughly 14% more than what traditional Medicare would have spent on the same patients [27]. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has projected that total MA overpayments between 2025 and 2034 will reach $1.2 trillion — with approximately $520 billion coming directly from the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, accelerating the fund's projected insolvency by years [28].

Two mechanisms drive the overpayments. The first is upcoding — private insurers submit more diagnoses for patients to make them appear sicker than they actually are, triggering higher risk-adjusted payments from the federal government. The second is favorable selection — MA plans disproportionately attract healthier beneficiaries while leaving sicker patients in traditional Medicare, but receive payments calibrated to a sicker population.

UnitedHealth Group — with $400 billion in 2024 revenue and $139 billion in Medicare Advantage revenue specifically — is the largest player in this market. In 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed both criminal and civil investigations into UnitedHealth's Medicare billing practices, focusing on systematic upcoding [29]. A 2026 Senate Judiciary Committee investigation led by Senator Chuck Grassley, based on 50,000 pages of UnitedHealth documentation, concluded that the company maintained a workforce specifically dedicated to capturing additional diagnoses, including deploying nurses to patients' homes for risk assessments and incentivizing external providers to assess patients for profitable conditions [30]. A Wall Street Journal analysis estimated that in 2021 alone, these practices led to $8.7 billion in additional payments to UnitedHealth from the federal government [31]. One whistleblower case, filed in 2011 and ongoing for over a decade, alleged $2.1 billion in improper billings over a seven-year period.

Now consider the structure. Medicare funds are collected from working Americans through payroll taxes. Medicaid funds are collected from general revenues. Both are meant to serve the poor, the elderly, and the disabled — the exact categories of beneficiary that the Umar ibn al-Khattab waqf at Khaybar was designated to serve. In a waqf system, if a trustee were caught diverting revenue from the designated beneficiaries — the poor, the wayfarer, those seeking freedom from debt — the shari'ah court would remove him. The waqf deed is the binding document. The founder's intent governs.

In the American system, a decade of litigation produces no penalties. The private insurer keeps the money. The Medicare trust fund moves toward insolvency. The Part B premium paid by elderly Americans rises to fund the excess. The private company's stock price recovers. This is not a bug. This is the architecture.

The 501(c)(3) Religious Tax Exemption: Parsonages and Private Jets

A parallel structural failure exists in American religious tax law. Under U.S. federal law, religious organizations registered as 501(c)(3) non-profits are exempt from federal income tax and are not required to file the IRS Form 990 disclosure that other charities must file. Under Texas state law (and similar laws in many other states), a "parsonage" — a residence for a clergyman — is exempt from property tax.

Televangelist Kenneth Copeland, founder of Eagle Mountain International Church in Tarrant County, Texas, lives in an 18,000-square-foot mansion valued at approximately $7 million on 24 acres of lakefront property. Under Texas Tax Code Section 11.20, this residence is designated a "parsonage" for his church and is accordingly tax-exempt. The classification saves Copeland approximately $150,000 per year in property taxes — a cost borne by the local tax base, meaning schools, roads, and municipal services funded by the working residents of Tarrant County [32]. Copeland's ministry owns multiple private jets, including a Gulfstream V reportedly acquired for $20 million; his personal net worth has been estimated at figures ranging from $300 million to over $750 million, making him reputedly the wealthiest pastor in America [33]. He has publicly stated that he avoids commercial aviation because he does not wish to "get into a tube with a bunch of demons."

Joel Osteen, pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston — the largest megachurch in the United States, occupying the former Compaq Center, once home of the NBA's Houston Rockets — draws no salary from the church (since 2005) but has accumulated a personal net worth estimated at over $100 million through book sales and media royalties. The church itself, a 501(c)(3) with annual revenue over $89 million in 2017 primarily from donations, directed approximately 1.3% of that revenue — $1.2 million — to charitable causes in that year [34]. The Osteens own a primary residence in Houston's River Oaks neighborhood purchased for $10.5 million and currently estimated at over $17 million in value.

A 2007-2011 Senate Finance Committee inquiry under Senator Grassley into six prosperity-gospel ministries — including Copeland, Benny Hinn, Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer, Paula White, and Eddie Long — investigated whether these organizations' tax-exempt status was being abused for personal enrichment. Several ministries declined to cooperate. The three-year investigation concluded in 2011 with no penalties and no definitive findings of wrongdoing [35]. The structure that had enabled the accumulation was left intact.

The Structural Difference

The contrast with waqf is total. In a waqf, the founder designates the beneficiaries, and the trustee is legally bound to serve them. The property cannot be sold. The revenue cannot be redirected. If the trustee enriches himself beyond a reasonable compensation, the court removes him. The beneficiaries — the poor, the sick, the students, the travelers — are protected by the legal instrument itself, not by the goodwill of whoever happens to administer the fund.

In the American 501(c)(3) system, by contrast, there is almost no binding designation of beneficiaries. A "religious purpose" is sufficient justification for tax exemption, and "religious purpose" includes the pastor's lifestyle. The organization is not required to file public financial disclosures. The IRS rarely enforces the prohibition on private inurement. The structure is, in effect, an optional beneficence — a pastor may use the tax-exempt funds for the poor, but is under no binding legal obligation to do so. And so, predictably, many do not.

The Medicare Advantage system operates the same way. A private insurer may use the taxpayer funds to provide care to beneficiaries, but the structural incentive is to minimize the care provided and maximize the payments received. And so, predictably, the insurers do exactly that.

Allah tells us in the Quran that wealth has a right in it for the needy:

"And in their wealth is a known right for the beggar and the deprived."
— Surah Al-Ma'arij, 70:24–25

The waqf institution operationalized this ayah at the level of legal structure. The 501(c)(3) and Medicare Advantage systems operationalize the opposite principle: wealth collected for the poor can be captured by the wealthy, provided the paperwork is in order.

Counterarguments: Kuran and the Family Waqf Problem

Any honest treatment of waqf has to engage two critiques — one external, one internal.

The external critique comes from the Duke economist Timur Kuran, most fully developed in his 2011 book The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East. Kuran argues that the waqf's defining features — its irrevocability, the rigidity of the founder's stipulations, the inalienability of its assets — made it ill-suited to the industrial era. As the economy began to require rapid reallocation of capital into new productive uses, the waqf's legal rigidity, Kuran contends, locked up enormous resources in purposes that the founder had specified centuries earlier. The institution that had been a strength in the medieval era became, in his view, a drag on economic development in the modern era [36].

The argument has a grain of truth: a mosque endowment from 1400 cannot be repurposed to build a semiconductor fabrication plant in 2026, and Kuran is correct that this represents a kind of capital inflexibility. But the argument conflates two different things. The first is the structural feature of irrevocability, which is precisely what prevents the kind of extraction-by-private-actors documented above. The second is the question of whether an economy should be organized around rapid capital reallocation in the first place. Kuran assumes the answer is obviously yes — because Western industrialization took that form, it must be the normative standard. But that answer is itself a question. An economic system that has produced $1.2 trillion in projected extractive overpayments from Medicare alone over a single decade is not an obvious model of efficient capital allocation; it is a model of institutionalized capture. The waqf's "rigidity" is its immune system. Remove it, and the institution becomes what the American 501(c)(3) has become: a vehicle for the enrichment of trustees. Furthermore, Kuran's thesis requires us to accept that institutional forms are the primary causes of economic development — rather than the effects of a larger set of political, military, and geographic conditions. Many economic historians have pushed back on exactly this point, arguing that his causal arrow is backwards.

The internal critique concerns family waqf (waqf ahli). Historically, this form of waqf was sometimes used to circumvent Islamic inheritance law. Because Islamic inheritance distributes an estate according to fixed shares among specified heirs, a wealthy father who wished to preserve his property intact for his male descendants could declare it a family waqf, designate his male descendants as beneficiaries in perpetuity, and effectively bypass the inheritance rules. This abuse was real, and classical scholars acknowledged it. Colonial-era critics seized on this to discredit the institution as a whole. The fair response is to acknowledge the abuse and distinguish it from the institution itself. The khayri (public charitable) waqf — the form that funded the hospitals, schools, and mosques — was not subject to this problem. And where the ahli waqf was used abusively, classical jurists developed mechanisms to curb it, including the requirement that family waqfs eventually revert to a charitable purpose upon extinction of the designated lineage.

Neither critique undermines the structural case for waqf as an alternative to extractive capitalist public funding. Both, properly engaged, deepen it.

Conclusion: What We Have Forgotten, and What We Must Recover

For nine hundred years, the Muslim world operated a system of public infrastructure that funded hospitals for the poor, universities for the brilliant-but-penniless, water for the thirsty, food for the hungry, lodging for travelers, and mosques for the worshipper — and it did so through a legal instrument explicitly designed to prevent the wealthy from capturing the funds designated for the weak. That institution was dismantled, not primarily by internal failure, but by colonial restructuring and post-colonial nationalization. The vacuum left behind was filled by imported institutional forms — the non-profit, the insurance corporation, the tax-exempt religious organization — all of which have proven, under the pressure of capitalist incentive structures, to be precisely the opposite of waqf. Where waqf binds the wealthy to serve the poor, these institutions bind the poor to serve the wealthy.

This is not a call for nostalgia. It is a call for recovery of a vocabulary. Muslims who find themselves reflexively reaching for "non-profit" and "endowment" when thinking about how Islamic institutions should be funded should pause and consider whether they have forgotten something. The Arabic word for what they mean is waqf, and it carries with it a set of legal and moral assumptions that the English substitutes do not.

The Prophet ﷺ told Umar, concerning the land at Khaybar, that if he wished, he could hold the principal and give its fruits in charity. That advice — preserve the asset, distribute the yield, bind the dedication in perpetuity — is the beginning of a civilizational answer to the question of how public infrastructure should be funded. The Qalawun hospital, the Sulaymaniye complex, the Qarawiyyin university, the wells and fountains and soup kitchens that stitched the Muslim world together for a thousand years — these were answers to that question. They worked. They worked for longer than any American public institution has existed.

Allah says:

"Indeed, those who spend in charity, both men and women, and who lend to Allah a good loan — it will be multiplied for them, and they will have a noble reward."
— Surah Al-Hadid, 57:18

The waqf was the institutional form through which this ayah became structure — through which personal generosity became perpetual public benefit, protected by law from the ordinary corruptions of power and wealth. It is worth remembering what we had. It is worth asking what it would mean to rebuild it.

Sources

  1. Waqf. Wikipedia. Accessed April 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waqf

  2. What Is Islamic Waqf? — waqf.org. https://waqf.org/what-is-islamic-waqf/

  3. Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith 1461 and Sahih Muslim — Abu Talha al-Ansari and the garden of Bayruha, connected to the revelation of Surah Al-Imran 3:92. https://sunnah.com/bukhari/69

  4. Sahih al-Bukhari 2737 — Umar ibn al-Khattab's land at Khaybar (sahih, muttafaq alayhi, also in Muslim, Ibn Majah, al-Nasa'i). https://sunnah.com/bukhari:2737

  5. Sahih al-Bukhari 2313 — Ibn Umar's administration of Umar's waqf. https://sunnah.com/bukhari:2313

  6. Sahih al-Bukhari and al-Nasa'i — Uthman ibn Affan and the Well of Rumah. Referenced in waqf.org, "What is Islamic Waqf?"

  7. Sahih Muslim — Abu Hurayra, hadith of continuous charity (sadaqah jariyah). https://waqf.org/sadaqah-jariyah/

  8. Ibn Qudama al-Maqdisi, al-Mughni — Book of Waqf. Hanbali comparative fiqh encyclopedia. See Wikipedia entry on Ibn Qudama: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Qudama

  9. Ibn Taymiyya, Majmu' al-Fatawa, Volume 31: Endowments to Marriage. Compilation by Shaykh Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Qasim. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Compilation_of_Fatwa

  10. "The Concept of Waqf in Islam: A Textual Study of Hanafi Jurisprudential Thoughts," Islamonweb. https://en.islamonweb.net/the-concept-of-waqf-in-islam-a-textual-study-of-hanafi-jurisprudential-thoughts

  11. Directorate General of Foundations, Turkey, "What is Foundation (Waqf)?" Summarizes Abu Hanifa vs. Abu Yusuf and al-Shaybani on waqf. https://www.vgm.gov.tr/foundations-in-turkiye/foundations-in-turkiye/what-is-foundation-waqf

  12. Islamonweb, "Hanafi Jurisprudential Thoughts on Waqf" — movable property rulings. https://en.islamonweb.net/the-concept-of-waqf-in-islam-a-textual-study-of-hanafi-jurisprudential-thoughts

  13. Bulut, M. (2020). "Civilization, Economy and Waqf in Ottoman Europe." Journal of Nusantara Studies 5(2). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366084548

  14. Waqf. Wikipedia — statistics on waqf land in the early 1800s Ottoman Empire, citing Directorate General of Foundations archival data.

  15. Al-'Adudi Hospital. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-'Adudi_Hospital

  16. Bimaristan. Wikipedia — al-Fustat Hospital established by Ibn Tulun, 872 CE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimaristan

  17. Nizamiyyah. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nizamiyyah; Al-Nizamiyya of Baghdad. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Nizamiyya_of_Baghdad

  18. University of al-Qarawiyyin. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_al-Qarawiyyin; Fatima al-Fihriya. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatima_al-Fihriya

  19. Muslim Heritage, "Bimaristans: Services and Their Educational Role in Islamic Medical History." https://muslimheritage.com/bimaristans/

  20. Frenkel, Yehoshua. "Political and Social Aspects of Islamic Religious Endowments (awqāf): Saladin in Cairo (1169–73) and Jerusalem (1187–93)." Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 62, No. 1 (1999). https://www.academia.edu/37925885/

  21. Bimaristan al-Nuri, Damascus. See Bimaristan article, Wikipedia, and Qalawun VR Project: https://qalawun.aa-ken.jp/en/facility/function/

  22. Qalawun Complex. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qalawun_complex

  23. Bimaristan al-Mansuri data — Bimaristan, Wikipedia, and Dompet Dhuafa, "Three Hospital Endowments That Ever Provided Many Benefits to Muslims." https://www.dompetdhuafa.org/en/three-hospital-endowments-that-ever-provided-many-benefits-to-muslims/

  24. Awqaf Australia, "The Süleymaniye Complex: A Waqf Masterpiece of the Ottoman Era." https://awqaf.org.au/notable-waqfs/a-waqf-masterpiece

  25. Daily Sabah, "Waqf: The backbone of Ottoman beneficence." https://www.dailysabah.com/feature/2015/06/09/waqf-the-backbone-of-ottoman-beneficence

  26. Britannica, "Niẓāmīyah." https://www.britannica.com/place/Nizamiyyah

  27. Center for Medicare Advocacy, "Overpayments to Medicare Advantage in 2026: $76 Billion." February 19, 2026. https://medicareadvocacy.org/overpayments-to-medicare-advantage-in-2026-76-billion/

  28. Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, "Medicare Advantage Will Be Overpaid by $1.2 Trillion." March 2025. https://www.crfb.org/blogs/medicare-advantage-will-be-overpaid-12-trillion

  29. Healthcare Finance News, "UnitedHealth acknowledges federal probe into Medicare Advantage practices." July 2025. https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/unitedhealth-acknowledges-federal-probe-medicare-advantage-practices

  30. Healthcare Dive, "UnitedHealth 'aggressively' gaming Medicare Advantage, Senate investigation finds." January 12, 2026. https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/unitedhealth-grassley-medicare-advantage-investigation/809377/

  31. Wisconsin Hospital Association, "DOJ Launches Investigation into UnitedHealth's Medicare Billing Practices." March 2025. https://www.wha.org/news/physician-edition/2025/03-04-2025/2

  32. Religion Unplugged, "Texas Pastor Kenneth Copeland Pays No Taxes On $7 Million Mansion." December 2021. https://religionunplugged.com/news/2021/12/27/texas-pastor-kenneth-copeland-pays-no-taxes-on-7-million-dollar-mansion

  33. Kenneth Copeland. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Copeland; The Roys Report, "Kenneth Copeland's Grandson Raising Money for Private Jet." 2025. https://julieroys.com/like-grandfather-like-grandson-kenneth-copelands-grandson-raising-money-for-private-jet/

  34. Celebrity Net Worth, "Joel Osteen Net Worth." https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/joel-osteen-net-worth/; TheStreet, "Joel Osteen's net worth: The televangelist's wealth in 2026." https://www.thestreet.com/personalities/joel-osteen-net-worth

  35. United States Senate inquiry into the tax-exempt status of religious organizations. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_inquiry_into_the_tax-exempt_status_of_religious_organizations; Senator Chuck Grassley, "Grassley Releases Review of Tax Issues Raised by Media-based Ministries." January 2011. https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/grassley-releases-review-tax-issues-raised-media-based-ministries

  36. Kuran, Timur. The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East. Princeton University Press, 2011. Critical reviews discussed in: MERIP, "Kuran, The Long Divergence." https://www.merip.org/2011/08/kuran-the-long-divergence/; MPRA, "The Long Divergence: Book Review." https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/41674/7/MPRA_paper_41674.pdf

May Allah reward every founder of every waqf that still serves the sick, the poor, the student, and the traveler — and may He grant this ummah the wisdom to rebuild what was dismantled. Ameen.

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