French colonial scholars misrepresented the family waqf to justify abolishing it.

Evidence

To accomplish their goal, the French legal specialists produced a flood of argument to the effect that a fundamental distinction existed between family and public waqfs—a distinction that had never acquired the same meaning, or a sharp separation, in the Shariʿa. Capitalizing on the centrality of the Quran to Muslim belief and practice, they vehemently insisted that the family waqf was a later innovation (bidʿa) in Islam, also playing on this latter concept as a topic that had received some attention in the Muslim legal tradition itself, in which some jurists had rejected certain legal rules as unwarranted creations. On these grounds, they concluded, through the best scholarly method they could muster, that family endowments circumvented the Quranic law of inheritance that operates by the principle of shares. It was not relevant to their argument to clarify that Muslims had a good reason to develop waqfs in the service of inheritance law within the family, because the Quranic shares’ system tended to fragment family property. Nor was it relevant to note, as scholarship is supposed to do in the interest of balance, that the waqf not only was a space for property devolution but had the much larger function of redistribution of wealth, a mechanism that reflected Islam’s great emphasis on egalitarian “economics.” Nor yet was it relevant, if it was understood at all, that this institution was crucial for the formation of a civil society the likes of which modernity has never known. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 238

Categorization

• SEED: The waqf as an early Islamic wealth-redistribution and civil-society institution that prefigured modern welfare — a genuine historical counterweight to narratives that egalitarian economics began in the West.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the ‘On Sacrifice’ interest in how scholarly/colonial discourse retroactively reengineers indigenous institutions to justify intervention.
• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism and to Foucault’s discourse theory — the ‘scholarly cloud’ masking imperial agenda.