The palace of Habib Pasha Doss in Assiut which he endowed as a waqf to the Monastery of the Holy Virgin in Muharraq, Assiut in 1926
Charity plays a large role in Egypt. The waqf system, by which endowments or revenues of assets are dedicated by benefactors exclusively for financing services to the public or the needy, is largely revered by one and by all. The system finances services which, literally, would have ceased to exist for lack of funds were it not for the waqf. Since most waqfs came in the form of land or real estate, popular belief has it that, if ever you happened to tread the grounds of a waqf, you had to wipe away the dust that stuck to your shoes before leaving the premises since taking away anything with you amounted to theft.
Golden age
The waqf reached its golden age during the Mameluk era which spanned the period from the 12th to the 18th centuries.
Waqfs supported monasteries and convents, mosques and hospitals, as well as schools (madrasa). They provided scholarship expenses for scholars who left their villages to study at al-Azhar.
Hospitals such as the one built by Sultan al-Mansour Qalaoun who reigned from 1279 to 1290—which was by any standard one the most advanced medical institutions on earth—testify to the great human contributions provided by the waqfs. Qalaoun allocated the revenues of a host of waqfs to finance the hospital.
When Mohamed Ali became ruler of Egypt in 1805, he tried to tighten his grip over the waqfs and used their revenues to finance his projects to modernize Egypt. The waqf land at this time amounted to 600,000 feddans (a feddan is 4,200 square metres of land). Although he issued a decree banning new waqfs, he failed to undermine their cultural and social role. The rich, including members of Mohamed Ali’s family, continued to allocate waqfs to finance mosques, schools, libraries and the like.
First university
Over subsequent Islamic eras, waqfs were the main of financial source for education. This system had a positive impact: it protected the independence of the educational process in the face of the swings of politics. As the country was heading on the way of modernity, secular education was introduced and the government became responsible for education. Yet religious education, and particularly al-Azhar and other institutes, remained financed by the waqfs side by side with the schools affiliated to Islamic societies and schools for girls. Princess Fatma, the daughter of Khedive Ismail, gave 184 feddans for the Princess Fatma School in Mansoura.
The idea of building Egypt’s first secular university—today’s Cairo University—attracted a host of landowners who allocated some of their land to finance the activities of the university. Mustafa Bey al-Ghamrawi allocated six feddans for the university. Princess Fatma made the largest contribution, offering six feddans for the university’s buildings and the revenue of 647 feddans to finance the education service. The university opened in 1908 under the name of Fouad I University.
State sequestration
In the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of 1952 Revolution, a law was passed to prohibit waqfs, dissolve those already existing and give back the assets to descendants of original owners. Meanwhile, a land reform law was promulgated to place a ceiling of 200 feddans on land ownership. The government confiscated land above this limit and distributed the sequestrated land among peasant farmers.
The problem of waqf land, which amounted to 500,000 feddans, was further complicated as some of those set to regain waqf had land of their own. Yet the State was aware that if it failed to control the waqf system, the entire land process would be placed in jeopardy. Thus the State tightened its grip over waqf land and laws were passed to give the State a full mandate over waqfs regardless of the will of the owners. Agricultural land within the framework of waqf system ended up as property of Land Reform Authority, and the original owners were given a reparation of bonds with 4 per cent annual interest.
Coptic waqfs
Coptic waqfs in particular represent a thorny file, since part of the land is a matter of dispute between the Coptic Waqf Authority and the Islamic Waqf Authority, an affiliate of the Ministry of Islamic Endowments (Waqfs). The absence of accurate documents defining Coptic waqfs adds to the complexities of the problem.
In 1888, the Coptic Melli (Community) Council formed a committee to survey and run Coptic waqfs. Yet when the committee investigated these waqfs it found a host of irregularities in the way they were managed. Thus a sort of generational conflict erupted between monastery heads and the committee members—most of whom were younger and had been educated in French and English schools founded in the second half of the 19th century. Pope Kyrillos V interfered and froze the Melli Council.
Longstanding dispute
In 1905, Girgis Henein Bey, the then finance minister, whose mandate covered surveying financial, real estate and agricultural properties, exerted an outstanding individual effort when he listed all the Coptic waqfs and found out that the Church owned plenty of neglected assets including buildings, schools and land whose value amounted to a then staggering EGP2 million.
When the government dismantled the Waqf Authority in 1953, it threatened to trigger a dispute between the State and the Church. Even though the former rectified the mistake in 1960 by passing a law authorising the formation of a Coptic Waqf Authority, the law was riddled with countless flaws. A 200-feddan limit was placed on land ownership by any monastery, even though the waqfs in several cases exceeded that limit. Furthermore, numerous Coptic waqfs had been seized by the State in the period from 1953 to 1960 when there was no law regulating the process. Ishaq Ibrahim, a member of Melli Council, filed a lawsuit to regain the Coptic waqfs, but it was not until 30 years later that a ruling was issued to allow the Church to regain its property.
Unfair
In 1996, pressure exerted by the international Coptic movement urged the Egyptian regime to move to settle the question of Coptic waqfs. President Mubarak issued a decree to form a joint committee embodying the Coptic and Islamic waqf authorities to investigate Coptic waqfs. Although some waqf properties were returned to the Coptic Waqf Authority, two defects dogged the committee’s work. First, the authority should have been compensated for the asset revenues of the past decades, yet it received no reparation whatsoever. Second, when the committee found that a Coptic waqf was unregistered—many of the waqfs were allocated before the institution of modern registration systems—it divided it equally between the Coptic and Islamic waqf authorities. This is unfair since the rule was never applied to Islamic waqfs 500,000 feddans of which have no formal papers.
A recent paper by Dr Bayumi Ibrahim, researcher at the National Centre for Sociological and Criminological Research, studied the waqf system in Egypt and found that the laws introduced after the 1952 Revolution dealt a severe blow to charity work. Legal provisions are needed for the waqf system so as to encourage those with benevolent intentions to allocate part of their fortunes to help the needy. Dr Ibrahim called for including the waqf system within the framework of the civil sector and unifying legal provisions and administrative rules governing Islamic and Coptic waqfs.