European scholars-turned-officers campaigned to abolish the waqf as primitive

Evidence

But they also demanded, and received the promise, that the waqf system—which barred real property from entering the open market—would be abolished. Over the next two decades, more specifically between 1860 and 1880, the pressure was intensified by both the British and the French, whose scholars—doubling as colonialist officers—were already propounding the idea, in academia and outside it, that waqfs reflected a primitive mode, that they belonged to the age of decadence when the “Church” controlled much wealth, and that they stood in the way of economic development, which is to say, progress. All this amounted to a campaign, in Europe, in French Algeria, and in the Ottoman Empire, to the effect that waqf was a cause of cultural malaise and material decline. As a result, the so-called reformers moved aggressively against the waqf, thus sustaining the drive that eventually led to its abolition in the new Turkish Republic and elsewhere. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 231

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that waqf barred property from the open market and impeded development was itself a European ideological framing; what did the historical record of Ottoman waqf actually show about economic function?
• SEED: The ‘scholars doubling as colonialist officers’ framing is a powerful angle: how ‘progress’ discourse functioned as a weapon of property transfer from religious/endowment custody to foreign purchasers.
• XREF: Connects to the land-privatization and dispossession mechanisms in ‘The Library: A Fragile History’ (print abolishing manuscript-era autonomy) and to Milgrom on institutions emerging where knowledge is costly — here knowledge is weaponized to dismantle institutions.
• BMF: The campaign framing religious endowments as decadent Church-style hoarding blocking ‘progress’ echoes Things Fall Apart’s missionaries recasting Igbo clan institutions as savage obstacles to civilization before dismantling them.