UCLA

This is a history of Muslim legal institutions dedicated to preserving and investing the property of orphans in Egypt and Syria in the Islamic Middle Period. These institutions coalesced into centralized treasuries under the control of the judiciary in Cairo and Damascus and accumulated enough resources to fund large-scale military campaigns. In Cairo, this institution was known as the mūda‘ al-ḥukm; in Damascus, it was called the dīwān al-aytām or makhzan al-aytām. Orphans’ property rights were the subject of legislation since the Ancient Period in the Near East and a significant topic in both the Qur’an and early Arabic poetry. Although the emergence of Islamic legal texts played a central role in the creation of legal practices for preserving and investing orphans’ property studied in this dissertation, an analysis of Arabic chronicles and prosopography indicates that the creation and perpetuation of the judicial treasuries in Cairo and Damascus was a product of the efforts of both political rulers and Muslim jurists and judges. The eventual decline in the fortunes of these institutions in the early 15th century A.D. was due to the combination of the economic woes of the Mamluk Sultanate and the adoption of alternative, diffuse methods of preserving and investing orphans’ property. These alternative methods relied less on the centralized political power of the state but, rather, on networks of trust and authoritative fixed-texts of law. The employment of decentralized legal practices was facilitated by the increasing authority of particular legal texts favored by the legal school (madhhab). A study of Shāfi‘ī legal commentaries on some of the most important texts of positive law (furū‘) shows that Muslim jurists in the Mamluk Period nevertheless continued to authorize divergent legal opinions within chapters on ḥajr, which is the chapter that that most explicitly discusses orphans and their property. Thus, gradual change and innovation was countenanced within the framework of a relatively stable set of widely-recognized rules regarding the preservation and investment of orphans’ property.