arbiter
JournalsPricingAccount

Inheritance as a God-Given Right: the Debate on the Family Waqf in 20th and 21st Century Saudi Arabia

Dominik Krell

Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient2025https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341655article
ABDC B
Weight
0.50

What the paper says

Abstract The institution of the family endowment ( waqf ) has been abolished in almost all Muslim countries. One important exception is Saudi Arabia. Although Islamic jurists ( ʿulamāʾ ) in the kingdom consider family waqfs permissible, they are critical of the institution because it is often used to deprive women of their inheritance. Based on Saudi legal literature and court decisions, this article explores the legal discourse surrounding the family waqf . I show that while the debate on the family waqf in other parts of the Arab world was dominated by the rise of the modern state, capitalism and European colonialism, the criticism of the family waqf in Saudi Arabia predates these discourses and emerged independently from the thought of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (d. 1792). Subsequent Saudi jurists did not simply repeat Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s critique. Instead, they regularly diverged from it and from the Ḥanbalī school more generally. This challenges conventional descriptions of Saudi jurists as being monochromatically “Wahhabi-Hanbali” in their legal thinking.

Open paper page →

Cite this paper

https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341655

Or copy a formatted citation

@article{dominik2025,
  title        = {{Inheritance as a God-Given Right: the Debate on the Family Waqf in 20th and 21st Century Saudi Arabia}},
  author       = {Dominik Krell},
  journal      = {Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341655},
}

Paste directly into BibTeX, Zotero, or your reference manager.

Flag this paper

Inheritance as a God-Given Right: the Debate on the Family Waqf in 20th and 21st Century Saudi Arabia

Flags are reviewed by the Arbiter methodology team within 5 business days.

Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.