Land Privatization in Islamic Law? The case of irṣād in Egypt, 1850-1950

In this article, I explore the uses of the term irṣād in nineteenth- and twentieth-century legal opinions (fatwa, pl. fatāwā) issued by Egyptian muftis. This term can be rendered into English as ‘the public trust’ or, more precisely, ‘the designated endowment’. Kenneth Cuno (1999) argues that this was not a judicial category in applied law but that muftis used this term in Ottoman Egypt and Syria to justify the position of Muslim rentiers in an ideology of local notables between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Building on this argument, I suggest that this term belongs to the larger conceptual domain of administrative privatization of public land. I explore the relationship between the administrative uses of this term and its Islamic legal understanding in nineteenth-century Egypt. Finally, I consider how after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire Muslim jurists in interwar Egypt still identified some endowments as irṣād to provide flexibility for the new royal government.