This chapter explores a 1912 legal opinion (fatwā) by the Iranian Twelver Shīʿī jurist Muḥammad Ḥusayn Fishārakī (d. 1353/1935) on a dispute over the ownership of two villages, Jayshī and Saryān, both of which were endowed and had been illegally sold by a trustee in order to escape his various financial troubles. The fatwā upholds the legitimacy of the endowments (sing. waqf) and finds that their sale had been unlawful. The source sheds light on how Islamic law in modern and early modern Iran often operated outside the context of state institutions.

This chapter explores the intervention of the late-18th century Ottoman jurist Kadizâda Mehmed Tâhir in a longstanding controversy: the legitimacy of istibdāl (the exchange of an endowed property for cash, or for another property). This mechanism was recognised as valid by the Ḥanbalī school of law, somewhat exceptionally. Istibdāl was an important means of reviving defunct endowments (sing. waqf) whose properties no longer generated the income necessary to support the charitable causes they had been devoted to, as well as a means of ensuring the continued circulation of property in society. Kadizâda Mehmed Tâhir argued in favour of the legitimacy of this mechanism and sought to uphold the decision of a Cairene deputy judge of the Ḥanbalī school who permitted istibdāl in a case where the endowment deed (waqfiyya) explicitly precluded its use.