“Boy and Girl on Equal Terms”

Women, Waqf, and Wealth Transmission in Mamluk Egypt

Abstract

The paper aims at reappraising the position of women in wealth holding and transmission among the elite families of Mamluk Egypt. It is based on sample surveys of legal documents, both sale and endowment deeds, mainly dating from the ninth/fifteenth century, that are nowadays preserved in Cairo. It argues that at times of high mortality rates, frequent widowhood and remarriage, the Islamic law of inheritance proved to be particularly protective toward the female relatives of a deceased male. In such contexts, pious endowment

(waqf) was not only an option for management of estates but also used as an alternative, albeit legal, channel of wealth transmission in order to escape the law of inheritance and its adverse effects. In this respect, elite families of Mamluk Egypt, whether they were of local or foreign background, used to share the same concerns and values about family, as evident in the extensive use of the same type of endowment deeds while dealing with their waqf surplus income. This standard form, which is not found in contemporary notarial handbooks such as al-Asyūṭī’s Jawāhir al-ʿUqūd, sheds some light on the effective asset strategies of the ninth/fifteenth-century Egyptian elites. Their “chosen family,” which was outlined in the descriptions of endowment deeds, show several differences from the legal norms of inheritance; for instance, the exclusion from wealth transmission of the deceased’s widow(s) and of the children she/they might have after remarriage and, moreover, the equal treatment of boys and girls in the attribution to the founder’s descendants of his/her waqf’s surplus income.

The Cairene legal documents also reveal the extent of women’s contribution in dealing with the holding and transmission of wealth in Mamluk society.