Ottoman History Podcast - The Many Lives of Waqf in Beirut

Episode Date: August 5, 2021

with Nada Moumtaz hosted by Susanna Ferguson | The waqf, often translated as "endowment," is a critical player in the story of urban landscapes, charitable giving, property management, and religion in the Islamic world. But what is a waqf? In this episode, Nada Moumtaz uncovers the many lives of waqf in the city of Beirut, from Ottoman times until the present. We talk about waqfs as buildings, processes, acts, and investments. We see how the story of waqf illuminates central features of the modern state while blurring boundaries between family life and public life, religion and business, charity and investment, past and future, and human and divine. « Click for More »

A few weeks ago, I caught up on Zoom with Dr. Neda Momtez, assistant professor in religion and near and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Toronto. It was only fitting that we talked as Neda was home visiting her family in Beirut. Because for the past many years, Neda has been hard at work getting to the bottom of a prominent and curious feature of Beirut's urban and social landscape, the idea of waqf, an Arabic word that's usually translated by scholars as Islamic endowment. What I learned through our conversation, though, is that that translation is woefully inadequate. The waqf is a form of charitable giving and property holding that has deep roots in the

Islamic tradition. But Netta's research shows that it was also central to defining the state, the family, and the city of Beirut between the late 19th century and the present day. She also suggests that the waqf might have something to teach us about how to think expansively about questions of public and private, charity and redistribution, and the meaning of the phrase, the public good. What that means, who pays for it, and who it serves. So I should admit right off the bat that I thought about starting this conversation by asking you, what is a walk? Because this is a word that shows up a lot in history books about the Middle East, but doesn't often get fully sort of translated or defined. But I quickly realized that asking

you this question would be basically asking you to recapitulate your entire book. So I thought we might better start with a different question, sort of to set the scene. So I'm curious, if we were to join you today, Netta, on a walking tour of Beirut, Lebanon, where you currently are and where your research was based, how would we encounter the Waqf in contemporary Beirut? Say right now, the sun just set and the event had just come and the mosque is the most perhaps obvious example of a waqf and it's all over the city

and churches as well are also formed as waqf. There's a very obvious one, cemeteries as well. There's also waqfs that you might not necessarily, that don't look like what you would imagine a Waqf is. And these are, for example, a building. Like in the city, Beirut city center, there's a building that has this very famous chocolatier in Beirut called Pachi. And so they have a building in the city center and the Pachi building itself is a Waqf. A very famous example people might tell you that the ABC mall which is an enormous mall in Ashrafiyeh is actually a Waqf built on the Greek Orthodox Waqf.

Today you also find Waqfs that I was surprised to see, I will admit, when I started seeing them. So one I encountered at first as a sign on a building and on a street I pass by quite a bit close by where I live. And it says waqf Nahar al-Uloom, which is the waqf of the river of sciences. And I discovered later that this is a Waqf that is basically a library, but it is a digital library. And it is mostly, Waqf libraries existed before, but now it is really mostly this institution

rather than any physical library with books. And it is, you know, it works like, like a non-governmental organization or a nonprofit that gives CDs, for example, of these, or DVDs or CDs of these books for the purpose of spreading Islamic knowledge. What you're laying out here is a geography in which, I mean, I'm trying to pull out what things can be waqfs. So we have religious buildings like mosques or churches, cemeteries. We have commercial buildings like the famous chocolate shop or one of the largest malls in Beirut. We have waqfs as sort of endowments or institutions that belong to both Muslim and Christian communities. But we also have the

waqf as the location of what you called an act of charity. So there's something about it that's more than just the place or the building or the land. Can you say more about that? or the building or the land. Can you say more about that? That is actually a great observation because waqf in Arabic is both a verb and a noun. And it is in the lost law books defined as a process. It's an act of doing charity to waqf as I use it in the book. But it also is used to talk about the endowed thing so it is

both the act of making this act of charity as well as the building so it is a process as well as a thing the fact that the waqf is both the object and the process. And it's mostly used to talk about the object. It's something I encountered in the Sharia court archive. So in describing the limits of a type of property, they would tell you it's delimited on the Qibla or what is mostly here south. Which is the direction of Mecca, the direction of prayer. That's right.

It's delimited by the Waqf shop or the Waqf house. So it is very much still, even in the 19th century, very much used and has had become already very much used to talk about objects that are endowed in perpetuity for a charitable purpose. The history of Waqf in Beirut goes back to Ottoman times, but it looked a little different in this provincial city than in the imperial capital. In fact, I want to just say that there's two main kind of types of foundations in terms of size. So there is usually these very big foundations

that were founded by sultans and the retinues and viziers, etc., that usually consist of a lot of kind of public works, if you think about it, like a mosque and an associated madrasa and an associated soup kitchen and slews of properties endowed for them so they can support them and provide the salaries of teachers, the salaries of imams, et cetera, et cetera. That's, you know, the waqfs that you hear a lot about.

But in a city like Beirut that was really very, very small up to the 19th century, you don't have these enormous sultanic waqfs. Instead, you have very small waqfs made by inhabitants of the city for their like small mosques and small zawiyah, Sufi lodges, or for shop that distributes bread for the poor every Friday. So there's these very small endowments from people who are not necessarily very rich, but who are thinking about the hereafter. And they make these endowments for both these mosques and zawiyas and for distributing bread for the poor, but they also do other ones that are for their families. So they, to take care of their families, to make sure that their families

have certain properties that give them income. It's also a form of wealth management or inheritance kind of management to think about that property in a way to kind of devolve it the way you want to while you're alive to your children and grandchildren. So giving to the family becomes a kind of pious giving in a way. Absolutely, yeah. And that is, I think, a very important aspect of what I try to outline in the book, which is the importance of giving charity to the family. importance of giving charity to the family. The fact that care of the family is beyond a certain requirement when it is done with the intent of getting close to God is something that counts as an act of sadaqah and doing good. So it's all about the intent with which one does certain acts of piety.

And so in a way, what you're describing in the late Ottoman period is a world in which things that we now call things like, you know, inheritance or wealth management or trusts, you know, things that are thought about as ways of managing private wealth, right, family wealth, about as ways of managing private wealth, right, family wealth, and the kind of broader discourses of charitable giving, of piety, of sort of communal support, of public support, are not differentiated as clearly from one another as they might be today. Absolutely, yeah. I think you hit the nail on its head because it is in the other aspect of this equation is that even the mosques and the imams and the all of these public, if you will, functions and what you think of as charitable giving, were also in the 19th century very much structured around the family. So an imam actually transmitted his position to his son as long as that son had the qualifications, etc.

son had the qualifications, etc. So the logic of the family existed even in these public functions or public buildings or all of these charitable public works, charitable foundations, etc. So that distinction between these are for the family and these are for the public, in fact, were much more meshed. And the logic of the family was very much, I would say, kind of imbued all these different spheres differently. So is this something that started to change then? I mean, many of our listeners will be familiar with the period of Ottoman reform called the Tanzimat, right, which is often thought of as the moment of kind of the beginning of modern state building in the Ottoman Empire. I'm wondering if the WAKF actually shows us some of the central changes or processes that are going on in this era of late Ottoman reform. What happens to the WAKF during the Tanzimat,

in other words? I don't want it to look like there was something that was, you know, pre-Tanzimat that was static and that was kind of, you know, this is pre-modern Islam or whatever, you know, and then there comes modernity and there's something completely different. State building is a project that is continuous and continuously changing and its shape changes and it's constantly challenged, etc. So I don't think that I don't, I don't want to say that there is this kind of big rupture that is, you know, you have the pre and after, even though I do talk about certain ruptures, but it's not that I don't consider them to be something that completely erases what was

before. Despite these reservations, Neda did give us a sense of some of the new ways that people started to think about property, family, and time in the late 19th century Ottoman Empire. And the Waqf, of course, holds the key. I use the Waqf partly to look at a story of modernity, at what happens with the modern state, what happens in this kind of period of upheaval and big reform projects, etc. And partly, of course, I do see the rise of the modern state

is very much articulated around economy and wealth and progress. And that to me is what becomes really important for the modern state project. I see it in the way the WACFs become approached and as wealth, as if you want to talk about it as real estate wealth as part of that nation's economy that needs to be grown. And what you see is a change mostly in the administration of waqfs. And so, for example, in Beirut, most of these waqfs were basically administered by local administrators who were chosen by founders or who were very much inherited positions. And if there was no, if that line died, then the qadi would appoint one from, you know, the city. And what starts happening in the 19th century is, for example, in 1850, there's a decree from the Ottoman center saying that, well, these waqfs are not well managed.

The administrators don't have really deeds that confirm them as administrators. So the state, the center basically attempts to make itself the administrator of these al-qawf, these waqfs, and basically centralize their revenues into an Ottoman, into a waqf ministry, rather than the monies being, youies being distributed in the city, etc. So this really seems like a big change, that the waqf goes from being something that's adjudicated locally by a network of judges, family members, local administrators, and then becomes something that's adjudicated at the level of the state by an official ministry. And not only that, but it's adjudicated by the state in the name of something called good management. So they're adopting a logic of sort of, for the good of the population,

we will take charge of these resources and centralize them. So the standard of good administration is a term that appears in this decree. And it is a term that is in the Tanzimat decrees. And it is very much a term that probably also exists in a tradition of political theory and mirror to princes. And I haven't had the chance to examine that transformation, but there is something that happens with it, and it becomes the logic of administering these wakfs. And what you start seeing is this ways of managing the wakfs, including creating particular formats of registers, certain kinds of administration. There's a

process for everything that is unified. In Beirut, they have to send quarterly or trimesterly or, you know, they change all the time. They're like experimenting. Of course, it's not something that comes and is just like clear. They're trying and people sometimes do, sometimes they don't. You know, it's a complicated process of trial and error, but there is an attempt to actually try and claim all of these revenues of waqfs in Beirut and to subject them to a uniform standard of accounting, of administration.

And this has been described a little bit by some studies of waqf, but perhaps I try to think about it more in terms of tying it more to governmental power and to how the modern state is thinking about wealth and the wealth of the nation and the attempt to grow it and for it to be well managed. So these forms of charitable giving become a kind of laboratory for the modern, what you call the state effect, right? The appearance of there being such a thing as a unified, standardizing, all-powerful state, which of course doesn't exist a priori, but comes into being precisely through these processes you're describing of bureaucratization, standardization, sending quarterly reports, this kind of thing. It is, you know, when you start to have an administrator, a waqf employee, a waqf memuru, and you have, you know, a particular location.

So when you start having these, then the state starts to take a certain shape. I mean, of course, it did exist before. There was a qadi, but it's also a proliferation of such presences, as well as these processes of reporting and also sending money, etc., that make that state look much more real in people's lives. So I'm wondering then, obviously, in Lebanon, in the aftermath of World War I, the Ottoman regime is false and the French mandatory government takes over. And historians have done considerable work kind of figuring out change and continuity over that change in sovereignty. But I'm curious then from the perspective of the Wachf, what happens to the Wachf under the French mandate? And how can this shed light on this question of sort of change in continuity from the Ottoman period? I mean, I take certain particularities of the modern state to be

continuous. This idea of economy, wealth, and progress is something I think is very much essential and core to the modern state and its ways of, you know, and its existence, let's say. But then I talk about changes in what I call the architecture of the state and law and religion. And I think that is something that becomes quite different. So some people might call this, you know, sectarianism in Lebanon. But I find the term to have become like fourtu, and it just is used to talk about so many different things that I think we lose some kind of clarity about what it really

means and I think that we need to kind of disentangle the different strands and kind of be specific about what we are talking about. And I'm particularly talking about what you might call, you know, a secular configuration, the relationship of the state of religion and law. Of course, that changes tremendously because the Ottoman Empire, whether we want to think about them as Islamic or not, were very much based on the legal system, etc.

The state was the guarantor of the Sharia, and that was kind of, it's an islamic state uh and it's supplemented it's sharia plus siyasa or sharia plus qanun and um and both these can be framed as islamic as many have have been saying so the state itself um is very much, sees itself as an Islamic state, I would say. And that changes quite tremendously under the French mandate. Yes, of course, the French mandate government doesn't see itself as an Islamic state. I'm not a scholar of law, but I think that I can assert this without Too much pushback. over what becomes known as personal status law, which is marriage, divorce. And WACF becomes this really complicated in-between category. Is it really part of personal status?

Yes, there's part of it that is about, you know, transmission of wealth, but it's also property. So it should also follow the civil laws of the country. So the WACF jurisdiction becomes a place of big struggles. And until now, there's a lot of negotiations around it and a lot of flu, like, fuzziness, and there's a lot of competing laws around Waqf. And so at the same time it's defined as inalienable it's defined you can also exchange it it's really complicated

so it sits right on the boundary as you're describing between this new division under the French between the private religion the family and the public the economic the state absolutely yes and so it becomes then,

it becomes a very important space of contestation. It becomes an important space for various Muslim groups to kind of make claims on the state, as well as there's something that happens, particularly when it's placed in the realm of the private, which is that the Waqf become defined according to these French decrees that take over the administration of Waqf that define it as the religious property of the Muslim community, which is a very, you know, interesting way of framing it, which was

very different from the Ottomans' approach to it, because it's defined as the religious property of the Muslim community, it's considered to follow its religious laws, and therefore it is, in terms of its foundation and naming of administrators etc that falls under the religious courts. What happens at the same time though is that because now they become the religious property of the community then they become tied to the community as a whole and so they become Awqaf al-Muslimin, the Muslims' Waqf, or Awqaf al-Taifa, Orthodox or, you know, or Mu'arni or whoever. So the Waqfs become very much tied to these sects as their property. And it is not that, you know, Muslims didn't have, there was no connection between property and community. That definitely existed. But it was not one community

among other communities in a nation state. So that becomes quite different. And in addition to the fact that waqfs, you know, you couldn't do a waqf for the Muslims. That didn't exist. Scholars didn't consider that a valid waqf because the Muslims was too broad and it was, a waqf has to end to a perpetual charitable purpose. And the Muslims will always include rich and poor. So you can't do something as broad as this. So it has to be the poor. You can make the poor of the Muslims or the poors of Meccan Medina or the poors of, you know, wherever you want, but it has to be something charitable. But in the older grammar of Waqf, the category of

the Muslims didn't make sense as an object of charitable giving because, as you say, it was too broad. So it's under the French mandate that it becomes newly acceptable to identify the Muslims or the Orthodox as beneficiaries of Waqf? Yes, it is partly through the bureaucratization and the creating of this Waqf ministry helps in that because it pulls all of these Waqf's resources together in ways that, you know, were not done in the Ottoman period in Beirut beforehand. It doesn't mean that, you know, I mean, in, say, the Mamluk period, there was more of, say, a Waqf ministry as well. But there was not, you know, the logic of managing was very different

because they were not drawn into this idea of progress, of economic wealth accumulation, and kind of we have to grow the nation's economy. That was not the framework people were thinking with. And there's tensions in that in the Wachf legal manuals about Wachf, that Wachf is actually Wachf, which means the logic of it is it's to remain as it is, as its founder made it, versus kind of growing it. So there's all of enormous debates about whether you can exchange a waqf that is, you can exchange a waqf for one that is more profitable, if the original waqf is still profitable. So there's a lot of debate about that.

You have a really interesting phrase in the book where you talk about the WACF as an idea of charitable giving. And these are your words that delinks sustainability from progress. I'm wondering if that's partly what you're getting at here. I'm trying to talk a little bit to some debates about charity and development. And a lot of critiques of charitable giving are the fact that they are just band-aids. You know, they are just, you know, they fix the problem. I give you food now. I give you bread now.

But really, the structural problems remain. You know, I'm not offering a solution to your not being able to feed yourself. These require thinking about poverty more broadly, the structures that create this inequality and the reason why people cannot feed themselves or, you know, the reason for their poverty. So a lot of charitable giving has moved from these models of give people a fish to give people, teach people how to fish. You know, that's kind of the usual explanation given. And Munathiyah has written about that in Egypt, for example. And it is very much that charity then becomes geared towards teaching the poor skills that help them improve their lives rather than just give them food or money or however they are receiving handouts, you know.

And so the idea is usually that handouts are very much one-time donations that are not sustainable. However, what you find in WUFs is that actually, in fact, these are sustainable. WACFs are supposed to be perpetual, and you are supposed to give constantly from the revenues of the WACFs. They're supposed to be spent after being used to make sure that the WACF is in good shape and it continues to be profitable. You don't want to let it get into ruins. And so after these necessary expenses are spent, then you then distribute the revenues. So in fact, waqfs are sustainable. What they are not doing, however, is attempting in that period,

in the 19th century in Beirut, they're not trying to find a solution to poverty because in these earlier ways of thinking about the world, poverty is something that exists in the world. It is not something that we eradicate, the poor will always be there. And so there's not this idea that eventually, we will improve the world so that the poor will disappear forever. It also sounds like a way of meeting people's needs in the present without worrying about their, how do I put this, their deservingness, right? In that they're engaging with forms of

life that are deemed by the NGO to be likely to teach them how to fish, right? It's a way of saying needs exist, we meet the needs, and we do so in a sustainable way that isn't about accumulating wealth, becoming wealthier and wealthier, like a university endowment, right? But is about distributing wealth in perpetuity. And maybe there's something interesting to think with for folks who are engaged in working on development, or humanitarianism and these kinds of things. Yes, I mean, that is totally the case. I mean, you know, it's a very difficult position to kind of, I find it like, you know, as somebody who's very committed to social justice, it's very hard to kind of say, like, yeah, I don't

want to think about, you know, the future. But I think, as you put it, it is true that it the question of deservingness, and kind of the poor having to perform, you know, their poverty, and their that the fact that they're deserving poor, they're doing everything they can to get out of poverty. That is not something that is a question. Within the WACF grammar framework. Within the WACF. Yeah, yeah. Even though I mean, of course, you have to be poor. I mean, that's kind of the thing. A wonderful book on this particular question is my colleague Amira Mittermeier's book, Giving to God. And she actually does the amazing work to show that these,

that form of charitable giving of handouts, there is something quite, perhaps you want to say maybe revolutionary in it, in the sense that, as you say, like, yeah, it is not linked to that future constantly. It is also, at the end is not linked to that future constantly. It is also, at the end, there are needs that are met, and that need to be met. And it doesn't mean that, you know, other, you can't do these two things at the same time, is what I would say, you know, you can address causes of poverty, and at the same time, address immediate needs.

I'm also thinking that if we think with, you know, critiques of progress and accumulation, that these are the ideologies of colonialism and capitalism in the 20th century and before. And so it might be worth trying to think of modes of redistribution that swim against the current of those two logics. That you always have to be moving forward, that you always have to be growing. that you always have to be moving forward, that you always have to be growing. And that maybe the WACF actually provides an interesting site for thinking about a rhetoric of social justice that looks a bit different from those grammars. That's a very interesting question, because WACFs are such a part of the real estate market, and they are very much imbricated in these kind of, you know, they want to have income at the end,

otherwise they won't have anything to be, to distribute. So they are at the same time part of these capitalist kind of logics. But what happens is what you do with that money. And that's where they are very much about redistribution rather than accumulation. So whether, while they participate in some processes of dispossession, it has happened in Solidaire, you know, getting rid of these tenants that had stabilized rents. They benefited from these enormous rents that Solidaire, which is the kind of reconstruction project in the city center of Beirut after the war of 1975 to 1990. in the city center of Beirut after the war of 1975 to 1990. Basically, the Waqfs participated in this project of, you know,

accumulation by dispossession, you might call it. But they also are doing something else, which is they're redistributing money in other ways. So, yeah, so it's kind of this, it has this weird tension, again, tension, it's in between it, it is not just this kind of, you know, this is what I'm not talking about, these are not alternatives to capitalism that exists separately from it, it is something that very much is implicated. And it's part of this capitalist society we live in today. We could just close by talking a little bit about the scene that you sketch in the conclusion, which is in which you talk about being in Beirut in the context of Lebanon's fall 2019 revolution

and seeing graffiti spray painted on one of Beirut's most prominent mosques, which said tax the al-kaf or tax the waks, kind of like how people say tax the rich, right, in the United States. So this really stuck out to me. I mean, this is sort of strange for someone coming from Ottoman history because waks usually think of as like soup kitchens and schools. And you're sort of like, wait, why tax the woks so i'm curious if you could just say a little bit more about what you made of that demand um and and how this can kind of tie into these questions about you know what the role is of wakf in today's beirut seeing that tax the walks was like oh i mean you know walks everybody knows about them in beirut people know al-qawf but nobody really knows about them in Beirut. People know Al-Khaw, but nobody really knows about them.

You know, it's one of these things that are just very present, but not really understood. And it was very surprising to me to see the graffiti that was actually, it was sprayed not only on the main, the biggest mosque in the city center, but also on next to it on the Maronite church as well. So it was very much targeted to both communities. in the city center, but also next to it on the Maronite church as well. So it was very much targeted to both communities. So to me, it has, I think you can read it in so many different ways, of course.

Part of the debate for these questions of the church is the fact that they are serving a section of the public, but the problem with that is that in some ways it's the state delegating to these private institutions, them providing certain public goods, and those who vote don't get kind of the chance to decide what counts as the public good. So in some ways, this is a call for kind of a return to a certain degree to much more of a welfare state that provides for its citizens. So it is not, you know, you tax these religious institutions, say religious institutions shouldn't be given tax deductions for their schools. In fact, we should tax them, take that money and make that money available for the public to build public schools that will then produce citizens based on the way we imagine the nation rather than leaving it to particular groups to decide. And so, of course, it has

different visions of what is the state and the idea of the fact that we can have a nation. You know, there's like all of these ideas of we want to build a nation. And I would say sometimes it puts too much hope in the state as if it is something that's necessarily good. But it's also something that is desired, you know, when Dawle, you know, there's a bunch of books, of course, on Lebanon that just address this question of the desire for the state. But on the other hand, I think the state can also be, you know, oppressive. And so having also the possibility of other players might be important. So I think that's a difficult question and vision of the place of the state and if you want to call it civil society, you know, and these religious

institutions. And there's, of course, a particular, you know, we're speaking from a particular context, which is Lebanon, which where people feel very much that religious institutions have a lot of power. And there's this very big kind of symbiosis between a lot of the religious and the political elites. In a way, politically, there is an important intervention being done there. But I also think that if we think about it in a more kind of rounded picture, I think there's more complexity to the story than just that. I think there's more complexity to the story than just that. In this episode, we've gone on a journey with Neda Momtez and the institution, the act, and the theory of the Waqf. We've gone from the late Ottoman state, which turned to Waqf to claim and demonstrate good governance,

to the French Mandate period where the Waqf is really at the center of a new character in Lebanese history, the idea or character of the sect, i.e. the Orthodox or the Muslims. And then what we're ending with here in the post-independence period and then, you know, up to 2019 is this, again, the Waqf is really on the borderline between what's religious and what's political, what's public and what's private and who decides. And seems like its reappearance in the 2019 revolution in this kind of graffiti that you saw is really reminding us that these questions about ownership, about charitable giving, and about who's responsible for the public's well-being are really still very present in Beirut. I mean, the thing that I also wanted to say that is very important is that changes is the fact that

the state used to care about its citizens or subjects' afterlives, you know, the Ottomans, you know, that is something that was really important, but today it doesn't matter. So, for example, in getting tax exemptions in the States, there's all of these interesting cases. You know, the church is supposed to be rendering a certain public good because, you know, it provides spaces for worship and people can come to Mass and they are edified religiously. The big question happens when there's a nunnery

where it's cloistered nuns that make prayers for, you know, the faithful. And so that is not considered public good. Because, you know, these prayers, we don't really know. I mean, the public, is it really benefiting? So yeah, I mean, you know, if you can be religiously edified, because religion is good, because, you know, you don't steal and you don't, you know, so there's all of these ways that religion is worldly, that matters. But if you're gonna make prayers for their sins to be forgiven, the state is not really wanting to fund that. Because that's not really... No longer considered part of the public good.

Yes, exactly. Well, I have to say, after reading your book, Nada, I will never think about this category of the public good the same way again, in any context in Beirut or otherwise. And I just want to thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much, Susie, for having me and for these great questions. It was really fun. For those who want to find out more, keep your eyes peeled for Nada's forthcoming book, For those who want to find out more, keep your eyes peeled for Netta's forthcoming book, God's Property, Islam, Charity, and the Modern State, about to come out from University of California Press. As always, you can also check out the bibliography for this episode on our website, www.autumnhistorypodcast.com. And please also feel free to join us on Facebook,

where we stay in touch with our community of over 35,000 listeners and post news about upcoming series and episodes. That's all for this time. Take care.