Branding, Vanity, or Substance?
Mohammad Uz-Zaman, Chartered ALFBF, TEP
This article was inspired by the International Waqf Conference in Mauritius, three days of genuinely valuable discussion earlier this year. My analysis complements research I have undertaken over several years into awqaf, an interest I have since formalised through ADL Research in a study entitled The Evolution & Dissolution of the Waqf. Part one is available at https://adlresearch.org/.
Some of what follows departs from positions advanced at the conference. It is offered in that spirit.
A growing number of UK organisations present themselves as waqf. It is worth asking plainly what that word is doing. Is this the revival of a distinct legal institution, or is it a familiar structure wearing older clothes?
What the waqf actually achieved
For roughly a millennium the waqf was the principal engine of social welfare across the Muslim world. It served as a major instrument for delivering public goods in a decentralised manner, operating largely outside the state. Hospitals, madrasas, water infrastructure, inns and soup kitchens are examples of institutions which were funded without recourse to taxation, and some endowments created over a thousand years ago still distribute income today.
The mechanism is what distinguishes it from conventional giving. Ordinary charity is consumed. A waqf settles an asset in perpetuity and applies only what that asset produces.
Two terms carry the idea. The corpus is the asset itself: the building, the farmland, the shareholding. The usufruct is what that asset yields: the rent, the harvest, the dividend, or the benefit of using it. A fruit tree makes the distinction plain. The tree is the corpus, and it can be neither felled nor sold. The fruit is the usufruct, and it is what reaches the beneficiaries, year after year, indefinitely.
It follows that the endowed asset must either generate income, be capable of generating it, or be inherently beneficial by its nature, as a public garden or a well is beneficial. So the operative question was never where the waqf property sits. It was what constitutes the corpus, and how it must be preserved.
That record is not sentimentality. It is evidence that permanent endowment works as a funding model, quite independently of what we call it.
The position in England and Wales
There is no waqf statute in England. Bodies presenting as waqf are constituted, without exception, under general charity and company law.
International Waqf Fund (charity 1162805), formerly Islamic Relief Waqf, is a company limited by guarantee and a subsidiary of Islamic Relief Worldwide, reporting income of £360,014 for the year ended 31 December 2024. International Waqf and Relief Foundation (charity 1154905), previously named International Waqf Foundation, is a charitable company registered in December 2013. Waqf Foundation (company no.: 1210838), The Waqf Fund (charity registration 1208651, formerly International British Waqf) and Islamic Waqf Foundation (charity registration 1148320) follow the same pattern.
Every one is governed by the Charities Act 2011 and the Companies Act 2006. The regulator is the Charity Commission. Purposes must satisfy the statutory public benefit requirement.1 The corpus is protected, where protected at all, as permanent endowment rather than by any doctrine of habs.2 Trustees hold statutory powers, and the court may vary purposes cy-près,3 neither of which has a clean equivalent in classical fiqh.
Why that is not a betrayal
Before calling this a failure of nerve, consider the lineage. Gaudiosi (1988) examines the 1264 statutes of Merton College, Oxford, and argues that their structure of inalienable endowment, appointed stewards and income flowing to scholars in perpetuity corresponds closely to waqf practice already well developed in the Islamic world. The waqif maps onto the settlor, the mutawalli onto the trustee, and the beneficiary occupies the same position in both: entitled to the income, with no claim on the underlying asset.
If that transmission argument holds, constituting a waqf as an English charitable trust is less a translation than a homecoming. The vehicle may be the descendant, not the substitute.
The revival is linguistic, not institutional
Here is the uncomfortable observation. What is being revived in the UK and the wider West is largely the vernacular. The Arabic terminology returns while the governance is drawn, quietly and sensibly, from English charity law. That can amount to a linguistic revival presented as an institutional one, and the gap between the two is where the romanticism sits.
It tips into vanity at one specific point: where the label is preferred to the governance. A body that adopts the name while declining the accountability has taken the romance and left the discipline. Nothing in the tradition supports that trade.
The convergence question
Put the strongest case for separateness and it runs into a difficulty. Suppose waqf law does need to evolve, and suppose it exists in parallel to and distinct from contemporary trust law. Assume the evolution happens. What would it produce?
Registration. Independent supervision. Enforceable fiduciary duties on the mutawalli. Published accounts. A mechanism for varying purposes when the founder’s stipulations become unworkable. Protection of the corpus against dissipation.
That is charity and trust law.
An evolved waqf regime converges on the vehicles that already exist, because the problems it must solve are the problems those vehicles were built to solve. The advocate for separateness has to identify what survives the convergence, and the honest answer is: one thing.
The one thing that survives
The economic and fiduciary outcomes are reproducible within existing vehicles. What is not reproducible is the devotional intention of the waqif. In fiqh, qurba (the seeking of nearness to God) and niyyah (the settled inward intention with which an act is performed) are constitutive elements of a valid waqf rather than motive sitting behind the act. While the fiqh schools differ over the extent to which qurbah is required for legal validity, its significance is difficult to separate from the institution itself. English law is indifferent to motive, which is precisely why the label looks decorative from inside that system.
But intention is portable. It travels with the founder into whatever vehicle he uses. A settlor who establishes a discretionary trust in the consciousness that it is for the sake of God has made a waqf in the sense that matters. What intention needs is not a bespoke legal form. It needs to be recorded, and no standard trust or charity precedent records it.
Put the point that way and it stops being a Muslim question. The waqf is the most fully developed expression of devotional endowment, but it is not the only one. The Byzantine piae causae, the Hebrew heqdesh and the medieval Christian pious foundation all rest on the same premise: an asset withheld from circulation, dedicated in a religious consciousness, yielding benefit indefinitely. Merton College is itself an instance of it, a Christian founder in 1264 doing precisely what a waqif does.
So the gap is shared. A theist of any tradition who wants to endow rather than merely to give faces the same omission. The vehicle will hold the asset, preserve the corpus and account for the income. It will not record why the founder did it. That is less a defect of English law than a design choice, since a system indifferent to motive has no reason to capture it. Nothing, however, prevents the founder from supplying what the precedent leaves out.
What this suggests in practice
The workable answer is neither a new statute nor abandonment of the terminology. It is to use the contemporary vehicle, with its superior governance, and to make two additions.
Record the intention in the constitution. A recital in the trust deed, or a preamble or mission statement for a charitable company, declaring the dedication and the permanence of the corpus.4 Then retain the waqf terminology in the entity name, as the registered bodies above already do.
The name carries donor confidence and communal legitimacy, which are real and valuable. The constitutional recital carries the niyyah, which is the element no secular precedent supplies. The vehicle carries the accountability. Each does what it is good at, and nothing is asked to do work it cannot.
Renewal, not revival, for legacy waqf
Where waqf assets already exist, in India, Malaysia, Turkey, Indonesia and much of the Gulf, this is a different problem. Nobody there is reviving anything. They are administering live asset pools under statutory boards, and the question is whether that governance is fit for purpose.5
Kuran’s (2001) account is instructive. The founder’s stipulations bound the manager to the letter; in practice they were circumvented; legitimacy eroded as a result; and as the rigidity became apparent, governments found confiscation progressively easier. Inflexibility did not protect these endowments. It exposed them.
Folding legacy waqf into contemporary charity, trust and non-profit company legislation would bring accounting standards, enforceable fiduciary duties, regulatory supervision and a route to variation when circumstances change. If retaining the waqf name aids donor confidence, retain it. The name costs nothing. It has been the governance that proved expensive.
The perpetuity limitation
One constraint deserves honesty. Charitable purposes may run indefinitely, so the philanthropic limb translates cleanly. A family settlement in England does not. The Perpetuities and Accumulations Act 2009 caps the perpetuity period at 125 years,6 so a family endowment here cannot be perpetual in the way fiqh7 contemplates.
This is a limitation to plan around rather than a bar. A hundred and twenty five years spans four or five generations, and a well advised family can resettle or restructure long before the period expires. The practical requirement is that someone is watching the clock across generations, which is a governance question rather than a doctrinal one.
Conclusion
The waqf never disappeared. It is called a trust, a charity, a charitable incorporated organisation, a community interest company. Legal form was always contingent on jurisdiction, and the classical jurists used whatever instruments their own systems supplied.
The standards now attached to endowment are secular in origin. Anti-money laundering obligations, fiduciary duties, investment discipline and regard for every class of beneficiary did not come from fiqh, and there is little use pretending otherwise. But none of it is foreign to the tradition either. Each is what excellence in stewardship looks like once the stewardship is real, and a founder acting in consciousness of God has every reason to want it.
Humility asks the harder thing. It asks that the vehicles carrying those standards be honoured as fit to do the work, rather than held at arm’s length while we wait for a form of our own.
So: branding? Partly, and there is no shame in saying so. Vanity? Only where the word is chosen in place of the governance. What deserves advocacy is the act itself, the permanent dedication of a productive asset so that its benefit outlives the donor. If calling it a waqf is what moves someone to endow rather than merely to give, the terminology has earned its keep, provided the deed says what the donor actually meant.
The ADL Group provides consultancy and implementation solutions across a range of philanthropic structures and strategies that sit within the spirit of the waqf.
Notes
1. Charities Act 2011, s.4. A waqf ahli endowing solely for the founder’s descendants would fail this requirement and fall to be treated as a private settlement within the relevant property regime. Where the founder reserves benefit, the arrangement engages the reservation of benefit rules at Finance Act 1986, s.102, the pre-owned assets charge, the settlements code at ITTOIA 2005, s.624, and, on insolvency, s.423 of the Insolvency Act 1986.
2. Habs (حبس), literally detention or withholding, is the classical term for the act of tying up the corpus so that it can no longer be sold, gifted or inherited. It is the mechanism by which the asset is taken out of circulation permanently. Maliki jurists, and North African practice more broadly, use habs (plural ahbas, anglicised in the Maghreb as hubous) where Hanafi sources use waqf, and the two terms describe the same act. English law achieves a comparable but weaker result through permanent endowment, which restricts expenditure of capital but is subject to statutory release and to the court’s cy-près jurisdiction.
3. Cy-près, from the Norman French for “as near as possible”. Where a charity’s stated purposes have become impossible, impractical, or no longer a suitable use of the property, the court or the Charity Commission may make a scheme redirecting the assets to different purposes. The consequence is that the endowment neither fails nor reverts to the founder or his estate. It survives, but it is applied to objects the founder never chose and might not have approved. An endowment to fund a leprosy hospital in a district where leprosy has since disappeared would typically be redirected to general medical relief in the same area. The founder’s wishes are treated as a direction to be approximated rather than a command to be obeyed. See Charities Act 2011, ss.61 to 68. Classical fiqh has no general equivalent, because the shurut al-waqif, the founder’s stipulations, bind the mutawalli with near-legislative force. The nearest analogue is istibdal, the substitution of one endowed asset for another, which changes the asset while leaving the purpose intact, and is contested between the schools.
4. For a charitable company the objects clause must be exclusively charitable, so a devotional recital belongs in a preamble, mission statement or members’ resolution rather than in the objects, where it risks importing a purpose that is not exclusively charitable. In a trust deed it sits naturally as a recital alongside a declaration that the corpus is permanent endowment and non-distributable.
5. The colonial precedent remains instructive. In Abul Fata Mahomed Ishak v Russomoy Dhur Chowdhry (1894) LR 22 IA 76 the Privy Council held a family waqf invalid as an illusory dedication to charity, reasoning that closely tracked the English rule against perpetuities. The decision was reversed by statute in the Mussalman Wakf Validating Act 1913, and the modern Indian framework now rests on the Waqf Act 1995.
6. Perpetuities and Accumulations Act 2009, s.5. Charitable trusts are exempt from the rule against perpetual duration, which is why the philanthropic limb is unaffected.
7. Fiqh = the human understanding of God’s law. The fiqh has always been subject to scrutiny and revivalism as new contexts and issues emerge.
References
Charities Act 2011, c.25. London: The Stationery Office.
Charity Commission for England and Wales (2026) Register of Charities. Available at: https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk (Accessed: 5 September 2026).
Companies Act 2006, c.46. London: The Stationery Office.
Finance Act 1986, c.41. London: The Stationery Office.
Gaudiosi, M.M. (1988) ‘The influence of the Islamic law of waqf on the development of the trust in England: the case of Merton College’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 136(4), pp. 1231-1261.
Income Tax (Trading and Other Income) Act 2005, c.5. London: The Stationery Office.
Insolvency Act 1986, c.45. London: The Stationery Office.
Kuran, T. (2001) ‘The provision of public goods under Islamic law: origins, impact, and limitations of the waqf system’, Law and Society Review, 35(4), pp. 841-898. doi: 10.2307/3185418.
Mussalman Wakf Validating Act 1913 (Act VI of 1913). India.
Perpetuities and Accumulations Act 2009, c.18. London: The Stationery Office.
Waqf Act 1995 (Act 43 of 1995). India.
Abul Fata Mahomed Ishak v Russomoy Dhur Chowdhry (1894) LR 22 IA 76; ILR 22 Cal 619 (PC).
