The Convergence of Judaism and Islam. Religious, Scientific, and Cultural Dimensions

The Case of the Kuhlānī Synagogue in San ̔ā’, 1933–1944 r 139

reward, and an unbeliever is unsuitable for this. If he does establish

one, the thing that he has established is not the shar ̔ī waq f that is our

subject (italics added).”^64

Al-Shawkānī’s caveat seems to indicate that he was aware that non-Mus-
lims established pious endowments of their own and that they may have
had laws governing such endowments. His discussion contains a signifi-
cant ambiguity that allows two contradictory answers to the question of
what should be done about a non-Muslim waq f. The first of these consid-
ers the non-Muslim waq f void, in which case a Muslim court is justified in
redistributing, confiscating, or even destroying such property. The second
treats non-Muslims as free to establish endowments so long as they do not
seek the intervention of the Sharī ̔ah court.^65 In other words, “don’t ask,
don’t tell.”^66 On the one hand, non-Muslim pious endowments are cat-
egorically forbidden. On the other, they are not a concern of the Muslim
court so long as disputes involving them are not brought before the court.
Thus if the issue of a non-Muslim pious endowment were to find its
way to a Sharī ̔ah court, a jurist basing himself on al-Shawkānī’s position
might conclude either that the issue lay outside the court’s proper sphere,
the Sharī ̔ah, or that he might intervene. In fact, individual jurists reached
both of these conclusions.
Al-Shawkānī’s son Ahmad, who, like his father, served as chief qādī,
ruled on this very issue in September 1857. In his ruling (which dealt,
incidentally, with a dispute over the Kuhlānī Synagogue), the younger
Shawkānī quoted his father in his ruling that “unbelievers never perform
pious acts and the prerequisite for establishing a waq f is Islam.”^67

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Bernard Haykel and David S. Powers for their com-
ments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

Notes

1. Islamic legal manuals from highland Yemen, where the tradition of Islamic law was
   Zaydī and the non-Muslims in question most often were Jews, described hypothetical
   scenarios in which non-Muslims did something that was legal in their religion but that
   contravened Islamic law. Nevertheless, these prescriptive sources seem to have little or