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A lot of the time, when we think of waqf today, people limit it to only building masājid, digging wells, or charity with no lasting revenue. Talking about profit-generating assets, endowment governance, and sustainability is, sadly, alien to many Muslims, and sometimes even looked down upon. Yet, history shows us that Islam’s greatest scholarly and civilizational engines ran on exactly this model of strategic, revenue-generating waqf.
Take, for example, a small village that changed Islamic intellectual history: As-Sāliḥiyyah, a suburb on the slopes of Mount Qāsiyūn, Damascus. In the 6th century AH (12th century CE), during the era of repeated Crusader threats, waves of pious scholars and families from the Nablus region fled Palestine and settled this desolate hillside. These migrants, among them the Banū Qudāmah, transformed it into a thriving fortress of Hanbali learning.
From these families emerged one of Islam’s greatest jurists: Imām Muwaffaq al-Dīn Ibn Qudāmah al-Maqdisī (541–620H), the author of al-Mughnī, one of the four cornerstones of Hanbali fiqh. Together with his cousins and students, the Banū Qudāmah built a complete ecosystem for scholarship:
- Madāris (specialised colleges)
- Ribāṭs (guest houses for poor students, travellers, and scholars)
- A central Friday Masjid, known first as Jāmiʿ al-Muzaffarī and later as Jāmiʿ al-Ḥanābilah.
What made this more than a cluster of buildings was the strategic waqf behind it. The Ayyūbid rulers of Damascus, especially al-Malik al-Muʿaẓẓam ʿĪsā ibn al-ʿĀdil (d. 624H), deeply supported the Banū Qudāmah’s vision. They knew that strengthening a scholarly class was vital for moral legitimacy and social resilience against the Crusaders.
So the rulers donated income-generating assets as waqf: fertile farmlands, olive orchards on the slopes of Qāsiyūn, urban shops in Damascus’s bustling markets, and residential houses near the ribāṭ. The income streams funded:
- Maintenance and expansion of the Masjid.
- Salaries for the imām, teachers, scribes, and caretakers.
- Daily food and lodging for more than 1,300 students.
- Procurement of books and copying of manuscripts.
- Legal aid and teaching circles for the wider community.
Imam Ibn Qudāmah and his family set clear governance: trustees (mutawallīs) were appointed from among the Banū Qudāmah and their trusted students, ensuring transparent management, continuity, and alignment with the Hanbali madhhab.
In Al-Mughnī under Kitāb al-Waqf, Ibn Qudāmah writes:
- It is a condition for the trustee to be upright and just (‘adl). If he betrays the trust or loses legal capacity, he must be removed and replaced by another.
- If the founder did not appoint a trustee, then its administration returns to the judge, who appoints for it a trustee from those who are upright and capable.
- If the trustee neglects their duty or betrays the trust, the judge has the authority to remove and replace them — to protect the waqf from decay or misuse.
- It is permitted for the trustee to lease it in whatever way is in the best interest and advantage of the waqf.
- It is the duty of the trustee to maintain the waqf and protect it from ruin.
- The revenue is to be spent first on the maintenance and needs of the waqf property, then it is to be distributed to the beneficiaries.
- Whatever remains in surplus from its revenue is to be spent on further avenues of good.
- If the designated beneficiaries no longer exist, it is to be redirected to those closest to the founder’s intended purpose.
He also ensured the waqf deed included a taḥrīm clause — a standard safeguard forbidding sultans, governors, or heirs from diverting or dissolving the waqf. He stated the legal maxim: The condition laid down by the founder of a waqf is like a binding sharīʿah text.” He also highlighted, “Once a waqf is validly established, it is not permissible to sell it, gift it, or inherit it.”
This meant the waqf did not just build buildings; it built an entire ecosystem. Generations of jurists, hadith experts, qāḍīs (judges), and teachers emerged from this hilltop ribāṭ. The masjid and its learning circles remained a core of Hanbali identity in Syria for centuries, surviving waves of political turbulence from the Ayyūbids to the Mamluks and into the early Ottoman period.
Modern historians who study Damascus’s old waqf records have shown how these assets were detailed line by line in waqfiyyāt (deeds): farmland yields, shop rents, orchard produce — all tracked meticulously. If a property fell into disuse or rent dipped, the mutawallī was responsible for repairing, reinvesting, or litigating to protect the revenue stream.
This is how the Ummah’s greatest schools flourished for centuries without ever needing “fundraising drives” as we know them today. They had profit-generating awqāf, perpetual engines of financial independence that protected scholarship and students from the whims of rulers or the ups and downs of the economy.
Today, we talk about “sustainable endowments” as if it is new. But the Banū Qudāmah’s village on a hill shows us that the real Sunnah is not only to build masājid and dig wells, but to attach them to living waqf systems that fund imāms, students, books, orphans, researchers, and communities forever.
If we look at just one fruit of this waqf, it is enough to reveal its immense impact and importance. Imam Ibn Qudāmah became the very bedrock of Hanbali jurisprudence. He developed a comprehensive curriculum that could take a novice student from the first steps of learning to the rank of seasoned scholarship. He is most famous for his monumental work Al-Mughnī, an encyclopaedia of comparative fiqh that presents the Hanbali view alongside the positions of other madhāhib. Even non-Hanbali jurists and contemporary legal scholars still rely on it for cross-madhhab research and rulings. Beyond Al-Mughnī, Ibn Qudāmah authored a rich corpus of works on jurisprudence, creed, legal theory, spirituality, and practical guidance for judges and students.
These works endured and spread across the centuries not merely because of ink and paper, but because the waqf funded far more than walls and buildings: it sustained teachers, supported students, employed copyists, and preserved entire chains of scholarship for more than eight centuries.
So every page of Al-Mughnī that is studied, every verdict issued by a judge referencing it, every student who memorises Al-Kāfī, every line of creed clarified by Lumʿat al-Iʿtiqād — all of it carries a share of reward for Ibn Qudāmah himself, for the Banū Qudāmah family who built and governed the waqf, for the rulers who endowed it, and for every trustee who safeguarded it across the centuries. Their vision and foresight show us that a well-designed, sustainable waqf is not simply an asset on earth; it is an everflowing river of reward in the hereafter, exactly as the Prophet ﷺ promised.
