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Narrated ‘Abdullāh ibn ‘Umar (may Allah be pleased with them both): (My father) ‘Umar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb acquired some land at Khaybar, so he came to the Prophet ﷺ to seek his counsel about it and said: “O Messenger of Allah ﷺ, I have acquired some land at Khaybar. I have never obtained property (so fine and) more precious to me than this. What do you command me to do with it?” The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: “If you wish, keep the land itself in your ownership and give its produce in charity.” Ibn ‘Umar says that ‘Umar gave it in charity on the condition that it would not be sold, nor given away as a gift, nor inherited. He (may Allah be pleased with him) devoted it as charity (waqf) for the needy, for relatives, for freeing slaves, for those who fight in the way of Allah, and for travellers. And there is no blame upon the one who administers it (the waqf) if he takes from it according to what is customary for his own needs or gives it to someone in need.

In the terminology of the Sharī‘ah, waqf means to give something in the way of Allah in such a manner that the asset itself is preserved and the income derived from it is spent in a lawful cause from which Allah’s creation benefits — but the asset itself is not sold or gifted away. Our religion invites man to spend. Unlike other societies, Islamic society is a society of giving. Allah says in the Holy Qur’an:

“Who is it that will lend to Allah a goodly loan, so that He may multiply it for him many times over?” (al-Baqarah, 245)

When this noble verse was revealed, one of the Companions gave in the way of Allah a garden of his containing seven hundred date palms, and taking his wife and children who lived in that garden he set out from there — and at that moment his wife was saying, “You have made a very fine bargain.”

Devoting something as waqf in the way of Allah is a form of spending whose reward continues to reach a person even after his life has ended. It has been the practice among Muslims from the very beginning, to the extent that there was not one of the noble Companions who did not devote some part of his property as waqf; and the people of goodness have carried this sunnah forward ever since. In the past Muslims established endowments of every kind — for example: waqf for building mosques, waqf for educational institutions, waqf for hospitals, waqf for the comfort of travellers on the highways, waqf for building houses for the needy, waqf for food kitchens for the unemployed, waqf for digging wells, waqf for providing milk for nursing infants, waqf for orphans, waqf for arranging the shrouding and burial of the poor and those with no family, waqf for those who fight in the way of Allah, waqf for the marriages of poor young men and women, waqf for the care of animals, and so on.

This path is still open today; indeed there is an urgent need for us to establish endowments of various kinds through which the different needs of society may be met.

Our wealthy class, which spends hundreds of thousands on an ordinary function whose entire yield is a few moments of pleasure — when it is asked to spend in the way of Allah, a shudder comes over it. In this it sees only its own loss, whereas this is in fact its true earning; everything else is to be left behind right here.