Held in trust : Waqf in the Islamic world
Waqfs (pious endowments) long held a crucial place in the political, economic, and social life of the Islamic world. Waqfs were major sources of education, health care, and employment; they shaped the city and contributed to the upkeep of religious edifices. They constituted a major resource, and their status was at stake in repeated struggles to impose competing definitions of legitimacy and community. Closer examination of the diverse legal, institutional, and practical aspects of waqfs in different regions and communities is necessary to a deeper understanding of their dynamism and resilience. This volume, which evolved from papers delivered at the 2005 American University in Cairo Annual History Seminar, offers a meticulous set of studies that fills a gap in our knowledge of waqf and its uses.
Cash Waqf: Exploring Concepts, Jurisprudential Boundaries and Applicability to Contemporary Islamic Microfinance
In Islam, Waqf is one of the most encouraged and sought-after supererogatory charitable practices. A deed of Waqf encapsulates spiritual, social and economic dimensions but traditionally has been linked with endowments of real estate that either producing direct social returns as in the case of hospitals, schools etc or indirectly through producing rental returns. The validity of setting up a sum of money in the form of a Cash Waqf was approved by some classical jurists as early as the eighth century, it barely received any significant applicability until the sixteenth century in the Ottoman era. During the Ottoman regime, the concept was officially sanctioned and profusely employed. In the contemporary context, cash Waqf seems to be one of the most suitable methods of endowment in perpetuity, given its liquid nature. This is arguably because cash is easy to endow, relatively easy to manage, more practical to distribute its benefits among a wider sections of beneficiaries or to deploy in the specific projects, and also easiest for beneficiaries to utilise for their day to day needs.The link between cash-Waqf and microfinance has, however, rarely been made despite the fact that many Islamic microfinance institutions are unable to access financial markets and therefore suffer from discontinuity of capital and lack economies of scale. This, in turn, has led to many Islamic microfinance institutions lacking economic and financial sustainability of the financing modalities employed and therefore produce often very little social impact.
Tropical climate and moral hygiene: the anatomy of a Victorian debate
On Wednesday 27 April 1898, Dr Luigi [Louis] Westenra Sambon (1865–1931) addressed the Royal Geographical Society in London on a topic of much interest to the Victorian public. An Anglo-French medical graduate of the University of Naples, a Fellow of the London Zoological Society and a recent visitor to Central Africa, he was well equipped to tackle the subject of the ‘Acclimatization of Europeans in Tropical Lands’. The ‘problem of tropical colonization’, he began, ‘is one of the most important and pressing with which European states have to deal. Civilization has favoured unlimited multiplication, and thereby intensified that struggle for existence the limitation of which seemed to be its very object…I know full well that the question of emigration is beset with a variety of moral, social, political, and economic difficulties; but it is the law of nature, and civilization has no better remedy for the evils caused by overcrowding.’ Even from these introductory remarks, it is already plain that Sambon's project was a compound product of medical diagnosis, colonial imperative, Darwinian demography and moral evaluation. And it is the rhetorical zone roughly marked out by this quadrilateral of disease, empire, struggle and virtue that I want to explore here. First, however, it will be instructive to return to that afternoon a century ago and spend a little more time listening in on the deliberations.