Preliminary Programme

This contribution concentrates on lesser-known Islamic family foundations (waqf) established by women in Ottoman Damascus such as the Satîta Khâtûn waqf, the Sa‘diyya bint al-Furrâ’ waqf, the Asmâ’ bint ‘Alî Ghâzî waqf and several others, focusing on the 19th and early 20th centuries. The aim of this paper is to identify the socio-economic habitus of these women who created family (dhurrî) and mixed (mushtarak) endowments in Damascus and to identify their objectives behind the establishment of their foundations. Although the focus is on women endowers of family foundations, the purpose of this contribution is not to work on a specific category of women’s waqf per se; Islamic law (fiqh) does not differentiate between men and women endowers and the documents registered in the Damascene Ottoman courts clearly support this.
Rather, the intention here is to study the individual networks relating to the women endowers mentioned above in terms of the beneficiaries that they named for their foundations, the administrators who managed their foundations as well as the properties (both built and agricultural) which the women established as assets for their endowments and the means of generating revenue from them (mostly via different types of rent contracts). These were individual decisions taken on the part of the women who established their foundations, all of which in some way reflect the individual networks of the women endowers in question, but they also reveal familial and other social values associated within the environment of these women.
The analysis of the hujja documents registered with the Damascene courts subsequent to the establishment of the endowment in question gives detailed information on the above issues in that these types of documents recorded specific changes in the supervision of the functioning of the waqf. Studying the hujja documents makes it possible to perceive the endowers’ objectives in terms of the beneficiaries that they chose for their foundations, the administrators whom they chose to manage their foundations and the properties which they gave to their foundations as revenue-generating assets.
The empirical information for this contribution comes from my recent research on waqf hujja documents located in the Damascus Historical Archives (Markaz al-Wathâ’iq al-Târikhiyya) in addition to chronicles and other related material which gives information about the women endowers studied for this paper. (Show less)

In the cities and towns of the Arab provinces during the early modern period of Ottoman rule, the Islamic pious trust (waqf) was frequently deployed as a cornerstone for family foundations. This paper argues that the family waqf can be fruitfully analyzed as a charter or mini- constitution that governs not only property relations between kin, but also the moral-disciplinary order of kinship. Through cases studies, the structure of the family waqf is examined in detail to show how its flexibility and capaciousness provide unique insights on, among many other things, the relationship between gender and property, between the conjugal and extended family worlds, between parents and children, and between the temporal world and the afterlife. Through a comparative analysis of waqf endowments in two cities, Tripoli (Lebanon) and Nablus (Palestine), it is further argued that the regional political and moral economies led to distinctly different deployments of the same legal mechanism. (Show less)

While the distinction between family and charitable waqfs (waqf ahli vs. waqf khayri) did not exist in Classical Islamic doctrine (Encyclopedia of Islam 1991), it is based on the difference between types of waqf beneficiaries: the beneficiaries of family foundations are members of the family of the founder, while those of charitable foundations include religious institutions and more general pious purposes. The singling out of family foundations from these more general philanthropic foundations supposes an opposition between family and philanthropy, and the exclusion of familial beneficiaries from philanthropic foundations. Philanthropic waqfs nonetheless have often had designated administrators from particular families, and have supported various offices (like imams, callers for prayer, teachers,…) which were often times hereditary. In this paper, I bring together two types of evidence, both from 19th century Ottoman Beirut, one from philanthropic waqfs, and the other from family waqfs, in order to show that both involve strategies of devolving family property, provided we re-conceptualize our notion of property. Indeed, while expressions like property devolution emphasize property as a thing, a more anthropological definition might include office and various rights (Mundy and Smith 2007). The first type of evidence originates from the Ottoman State archives and consists of the chronological appointments to the various offices of the Omari Mosque, starting in 1800 and up to the end of the Ottoman rule. The second type of evidence comes from the Shari’a Court Records in Beirut, family archives, and oral histories of the Qabbani family waqf founded in 1855, and include, among others, founding documents, rental contracts, appointments of administrators, and narratives of family history around the waqf. By comparing the types of property devolved and the patterns of devolution, I argue that given an anthropologized conception of property, both family and philanthropic foundations favor the family as a site of piety, to which property is devolved. The singling out of family as a site of piety distinct from public beneficence through the modern terminology of “family foundations” constitutes the conceptual shift in the contestation around family waqfs tthat crystallized in French mandate Lebanon. This process, I would argue, is a symptom of a changing moral order, in its moral subject, sites of morality, and the duties to which the moral subject is compelled. (Show less)

This paper will deal with the development of family associations and family foundations in the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century in Germany. Family associations (Familienvereine) (which from 1900 could be registered with the courts) were structured around the male descendants from a particular ancestor, ususally located in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. Descendants through females were explicitly excluded, and great stress was put upon the surname. Registered associations expressed in their constitutions the hope of accumulating considerable funds to be used for the education of the youth and the support of the elderly--and, especially, to pursue genealogical investigations. Foundations (Stiftungen) were created with considerable amounts of money, but they were based on the same agnatic principles and with the same ends in mind. Occasionally they were dedicated to keeping particular properties in the hands of the lineage, but they were usually based on movable funds, dispersed through the officers of the association. (Show less)