The practices attributed to Muhammad have promoted the institution of waqf from the earliest part of Islamic history. The two oldest known (deed) documents are from the 9th century, while a third one dates from the early 10th century, all three within the
Abbasid Caliphate. The oldest dated goes back to 876 CE and concerns a multi-volume edition of the Qur'an currently held by the
Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum in
Istanbul. According to
Marom,The latter stages of the
Mamluk period witnessed the encumberment of considerable properties as religious endowments [...]. Waqfization aimed [...] to control sources of revenue in a time of property confiscation and socio- economic upheavals and political insecurities. According to
Islamic law, only an
owner (mallāk) can dedicate properties as waqf, therefore necessitating the production, confirmation and dissemination of official legal deeds which document the process [...]. Because of the permanence [of] endowments under shari‘ah law, the
Ottoman judiciary collected, copied and abridged many of these endowments, whose original deeds are otherwise
lost. By the early 1800s, more than half of all arable land in the Ottoman Empire was classified as a waqf. This figure included 75 percent of arable land in present-day Turkey, one-fifth in Egypt, one-seventh in Iran, one-half in Algeria, one-third in Tunisia, and one-third in Greece.
Saudi Arabia The total number of registered endowments in Saudi Arabia is 33,229.
Jerusalem In the 16th century, the
Haseki Sultan Complex charitable complex was founded by the wife of Suleyman the Magnificent and serviced 26 villages; the institution also included shops, a bazaar, two soap plants, 11 flour mills and two bathhouses located in
Ottoman Syria and
Lebanon. In turn the State Wakf Boards work towards management, regulation and protect the Wakf properties by constituting District Wakf Committees,
Mandal Wakf Committees and Committees for the individual Wakf Institutions. In 2025,
The Economist estimated that India has about 872,000
waqf properties, more than any other country. Within India, only the military and railways control more land.
Zanzibar While it is difficult to pinpoint the historical origins of awqāf in
East Africa, the practice began to formalize in the 17th century after
Said bin Sultan had cemented his control over
Zanzibar and the East African coastline. Until this point, archeological evidence has unearthed several old mosques along the
Swahili coast that are believed to be informal waqf dating as far back as the 8th Century. The formalization of waqf can be traced back to 1820 when Sultan Said moved the
Al Bu Said-ruled Omani Sultanate to
Stone Town, Zanzibar. This marked a shift from waqf as an Islamic scriptural imperative to a local and centralized institutional practice legitimated by the royal family. From this point onward, the urban development of the port city of the East African archipelago was shaped by waqf practices. As such, the majority of greater Stone Town became waqf property, made available for free habitation or cemeteries by noblemen, approximately 6.4% of which was designated as
public housing for the poor. Economic changes in Zanzibar shaped waqf practices over time. Under Omani rule, slavery and the cash crop industry was booming, specifically because of the exportation of spices, which strengthened the elite class of the Omani aristocracy. In the context of growing inequality, the nobility used waqf to provide public housing to slaves and peasants as well mosques, madrasas and land for free habitation and cultivation. For instance, all 66 mosques in Stone Town were waqf privately financed and owned by noble waqif as a display of social status and duty to their neighborhood. Under this system, the architectural configuration of Stone Town was entirely managed by the Sultanate and its network of nobility. This effectively allowed elites to practice
zakat through waqf while doubling as a means to secure control over the local population. The East African archipelago experienced an economic recession from 1860 to 1880, which threatened the private property of the elite class. In a time when landowners were forced to sell or mortgage their properties to foreign investors, waqf became a means to legally safeguard properties under conditions of debt. By donating assets to the public, the aristocracy managed to preserve their wealth while providing land, financial support, and community spaces, such as mosques, to the general public. When Zanzibar became a British protectorate in 1890, almost half the island was waqf property. In order to establish control, the British realised that they would either have to privatise waqf or gain administrative control over them. A series of decrees were subsequently issued to incorporate all waqf properties into the colonial bureaucracy. The Waqf Property Decree, which established the Waqf Commission in 1905, comprised a majority of British officials and a minority of Islamic authorities representing the Sultanate, which maintained a degree of influence over the island. This shift marked the further formalization of waqf into the state apparatus, a move which allowed the English to directly control the preservation and maintenance of publicly used assets as well as the surplus revenues generated from them. It was also part of what
Ali Mazrui calls the 'dis-Islamization' and 'de-Arabization' of Swahili culture by British colonialism, a strategy used to rid the territory of Omani influence. While Mazrui speaks of this in the context of the Swahili language, it can also be seen by the way in which the British deviated from the Islamic values underpinning waqf practices. What was initially intended as a charitable practice that would provide social services was replaced by a focus on profit over public welfare. This ruptured the social and political relations that were formed between the upper and lower classes during Omani rule as the underlying values used to manage waqf were lost in translation. The Zanzibari Revolution which followed a year after independence in 1963 installed a new government under the helm of the
Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP). An important part of the revolution was the prosecution of the Zanzibari elite of Arabic descent. This left a significant portion of land, much of which was waqf, to be nationalised by the newly independent state as part of their socialist development programme. The revolution highlights a crucial turn point in waqf institutions in Zanzibar, namely the 'public' ownership of these assets that disposed of the need for a waqif. In this way, waqf was further cemented as a political institution regulated by a centralized state while being managed by mutawallis. It allowed the poorest inhabitants of Stone Town to reside in waqf buildings that were previously reserved for the relatives of waqif families. While this may appear to be an act of good fortune, the
nationalisation of all waqf assets led to the loss and destruction of many properties because of a lack of funding because the state did not have the means to preserve waqf as effectively as it would have been under the private control of the waqif nobility. According to Bowen, when practicing Islam, Muslims "engage in a dialogue between potentially conflicting cultural orders: the universalistic imperatives of Islam (as locally understood) and the values embedded in a particular society". While Bowen analyzes how Islamic rituals are practiced in context, this logic can arguably be applied to how the history of waqf in Zanzibar is shaped by "local cultural concerns and to universalistic scriptural imperatives". In fact, this conflict is evident in the way in which waqf has historically served a dual purpose in Zanzibar; to satisfy the inalienable Islamic law of waqf as a source of charity and thereby public welfare while doubling as a tool of domination used by the ruling class to maintain the dependence of the lower classes. While the former was somewhat preserved as a scripture-based normative foundation of waqf institutions, the nature and dynamics of the latter was contingent on the nature and dynamics of regime changes in Zanzibar. Under Omani rule, waqf was practiced by the aristocratic class as an outward demonstration of Islamic piety while simultaneously serving as a means to control slaves and the local population through social housing, educational facilities and religious institutions like mosques. When an economic recession threatened the position of the elite, noblemen used waqf to maintain ownership of their properties to avoid selling or mortgaging their land thereby altering the economic function of the practice. After the British gained control of Zanzibar and further formalized waqf as a political institution, it was used to culturally subvert the local population and gradually rid it off its Arabic origins. This persisted after independence when the newly independent state sought to further eliminate Arabic influence by nationalizing all waqf properties as a means to gain control of private property.
Other The
waqf institutions were not popular in all parts of the Muslim world. In West Africa, very few examples of the institution can be found, and were usually limited to the area around
Timbuktu and
Djenné in
Massina Empire. Instead, Islamic west African societies placed a much greater emphasis on non-permanent acts of charity. According to expert Illife, this can be explained by West Africa's tradition of "personal largesse." The imam would make himself the collector and distributor of charity, thus building his personal prestige. According to Hamas, all of historic Palestine is an Islamic waqf. In
Southeastern Europe, there are several places in
Bosnia and Herzegovina that were originally built under the waqf system, such as
Gornji Vakuf, and
Donji Vakuf. In
Poland, the waqf () has been legally recognized since 1936 as a civil law institution, exclusive to the
Muslim Religious Association pursuant to the provisions of the
Act on the Relations between the State and the Muslim Religious Association. ==Funding of schools and hospitals==