Waqf endowments usually had nonreligious as well as religious purposes

Evidence

One problem with that was that a waqf (normally translated as a “religious endowment”) might have a “religious or devotional purpose” (if it was a mosque, say), but more often than not it had no such purpose (as in the case of agricultural lands), or, more commonly, several purposes, “religious” and “nonreligious” (hospitals and schools, for example). Waqf (plural awqa¯f ) was simply the sole form of inalienable property in the shari¯‘a, described by Max Weber and others as “sacred law.” — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 986

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the religious/secular binary fails even to describe Islamic property law on its own terms — Islamic law was never purely ‘sacred,’ complicating the secularist story of religion’s confinement.
• QUESTION: If waqf was the only form of inalienable property, what did its ‘secularization’ mean for capital accumulation — a point to chase in the Cooper parallel around how legal categories structure economic life.