Arab StatesThe last decades have seen major shifts in aca-
demic studies about women and inheritance. If ear-
lier work often considered legal texts either as
having a determining impact on social practice or
as irrelevant for social practice, more recent work
questions such dichotomies and investigates the
multiple, complex relations between legal texts and
social action. This has also been encouraged by the
use of a wider variety of sources and methods, such
as court records, ethnography, and oral history.
This entry starts with a discussion of the various
laws of succession in the Arab world, and then
moves on to social practice. If women are legally
entitled to inherit, this raises the question whether
they indeed receive their inheritance share, or
rather, which women are able to claim their inheri-
tance and what inheriting actually means.
Laws of succession in the Arab
world
In those areas once part of the Ottoman Empire,
succession is legally regulated through two differ-
ent law systems. Property held in full ownership
(mulk), such as urban real estate, buildings, vine-
yards, orchards, and movables, is inherited in
accordance with the Islamic law of succession.
Most agricultural land (but not the plantations) is
not mulk but mìrì, land to which individuals could
acquire rights of usufruct and possession, but with
ultimate ownership remaining vested in the state.
This right of possession is also inheritable, but in
this case a secular law of succession is applied.
Within these two systems gender, marital status,
kin relation, and the presence of contending heirs
impact upon inheritance rights. The SunnìIslamic
law of inheritance is prescriptive and strongly par-
tible; it restricts the right of testation and stipulates
allotments to a large number of heirs, divided into
two categories. First in line are the Qur±ànic heirs
(ahl al-farà±i∂), who are entitled to a fixed percent-
age of the estate, varying from one-half to one-
sixth. This category mainly consists of close kin,
such as the father, mother, daughter, and sister of
the deceased, and the widow or widower. The
remainder is divided amongst the male agnatic
heirs (the ≠asaba), with the nearer agnate excluding
the farther. Certain categories of women, such as
Inheritance: Contemporary Practice
the daughter and the sister, turn from farà±i∂into
≠asaba heirs if there are male heirs of the same cate-
gory; in that case they receive one-half of the share
of their male counterparts. A widow is entitled to
a fixed share of one-eighth of her late husband’s
estate if he had children (not necessarily by her) and
one-quarter if not. A widower in a similar situation
would take twice as much: one-quarter and one-
half of his wife’s estate respectively. Daughters
receive a fixed share if the deceased has no sons:
one daughter is entitled to half the estate, two or
more sharing two-thirds of it. Thus, if a man dies
without leaving sons, a considerable part of the
estate goes to his male agnates, usually his brothers.
If, on the other hand, there are sons, these are the
first heirs and daughters turn into agnatic heirs,
entrusted with one-half the share of a son. Shì≠ìlaw,
in contrast, does not give such preference to
agnates, as parents and lineal descendants exclude
all other heirs. This allows for limited partition of
the estate; an only daughter may inherit the whole
estate, even excluding the grandfather.
While mulk property is inherited according to
Islamic law, a very different law of succession is
applied to mìrìland: the Ottoman intiqàl (succes-
sion) system. Its main principles are gender equal-
ity and distribution of the estate on the basis of
generations. The major heirs are the children of the
deceased, and if there are none, then the parents,
with the surviving spouse receiving one-quarter of
the estate if the deceased had children and one-half
if there were none.
In contrast to what may seem apparent in the
foregoing, the Islamic inheritance system was, and
to some extent still is, flexible as it allowed for
donations inter vivosand for family endowments
that make it possible to designate particular family
members and descendants as beneficiaries. Whereas,
as Powers (1990, 27–8) has argued, these forms of
property transmission were widely practiced, the
system became more rigid under the impact of colo-
nialism when the system of family endowment
came under widespread attack. Contemporary de-
bates about reforming inheritance law have re-
mained limited. Most legal systems have remedied
the problem of the exclusion of orphaned grand-
children. One interesting case is the Iraqi family
law reform of 1959, which extended the gender-
neutral rules for state (mìrì) land to all forms of