al-Farāʼiḍ

al-Farāʼiḍ (the “ordained shares”) is the Islamic law of inheritance, the body of rules by which the estate of a deceased person is divided among the heirs in the fixed portions appointed by the Qurʼān and the sunnah; the inheritance itself, and the law concerning it, is also called mīrāth. Among the most precisely defined branches of the law, the farāʼiḍ were established in the sīrah of the Madīnan period by a series of Qurʼānic revelations that replaced the customary inheritance of the Jāhiliyyah with a new order assigning fixed shares to those whom the former usage had often excluded, in particular the women and the young. The Prophet ﷺ esteemed the science highly, and a body of ḥadīth and a developed juristic discipline grew up around it.

In the inheritance custom of the Jāhiliyyah, the Arabs gave the estate to the adult male agnates who could ride, bear arms, and defend the tribe, excluding women and children from any share, on the principle that those who did not fight should not inherit. The coming of Islam abolished this usage and laid down a new law in which the nearest kin inherited according to fixed portions, women and children among them. The reform was understood as a restoration of justice to the weak, and the sīra preserves the occasion of its revelation in cases such as that of the widow of Saʻd ibn al-Rabīʻ, who came to the Prophet ﷺ with her daughters when their uncle had taken the whole of the estate, whereupon the verses of inheritance were revealed assigning the daughters and the widow their shares.

The Qurʼānic foundation of the farāʼiḍ lies chiefly in the verses of Sūrat al-Nisāʼ, which set out the shares of the heirs: the portions of sons and daughters, of parents, of husbands and wives, and of brothers and sisters, with the rule that the male receives the share of two females among the children, and the fractions—the half, the quarter, the eighth, the third, the sixth, and the two-thirds—assigned to the various heirs according to their relationship and the others who survive with them. These appointed portions, the furūḍ or fixed shares, are the heart of the system, and from them the science took its name, the law of the farāʼiḍ, the ordained shares.

To the Qurʼānic shares the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ added further rulings, clarifying and completing the law: the assignment of the residue, after the holders of fixed shares had taken their portions, to the male agnates (ʻaṣaba); the exclusion of certain heirs by others nearer in degree; the rule that the slayer does not inherit from the one he has slain; and the principle that there is no inheritance between persons of different religion. The Prophet ﷺ is reported to have commanded that the appointed shares be given to those entitled to them, and that what remained should go to the nearest male heir, and these and like traditions furnished the basis of the juristic elaboration of the law.

The Prophet ﷺ urged the learning of the farāʼiḍ and the teaching of them, and a well-known tradition counts the knowledge of the shares as half of knowledge and warns that it is the first thing to be taken away from the community. Among the Companions the foremost authority in the science was Zayd ibn Thābit, of whom the Prophet ﷺ said that he was the most learned of the community in the farāʼiḍ, and the later masters of the discipline traced their learning to him and to others such as ʻAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib and ʻAbd Allāh ibn ʻAbbās. The computation of the shares, with its fractions and its cases, developed into a refined and technical branch of the law, cultivated as a distinct science.

In the sīrah tradition, the farāʼiḍ are remembered as the law of inheritance revealed to the Prophet ﷺ at Madīnah, by which the unjust custom of the Jāhiliyyah was set aside and fixed shares assigned to the heirs, the women and the children no longer excluded but given their appointed portions. Grounded in the verses of Sūrat al-Nisāʼ and completed by the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ, esteemed by him as half of knowledge and mastered above all by Zayd ibn Thābit, the science of the ordained shares stands among the most exact and most honoured branches of the law, and its institution belongs to the ordering of the life of the community that the Prophet ﷺ accomplished in the Madīnan years.

## References

1 Abū ʻAbd Allāh al-Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, “Kitāb al-farāʼiḍ,” nos. 6724–6772. 2 Abū al-Ḥusayn Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, “Kitāb al-farāʼiḍ,” nos. 1614–16. 3 Abū Dāwūd al-Sijistānī, Sunan Abī Dāwūd, “Kitāb al-farāʼiḍ,” nos. 2885–2903. 4 al-Shāfiʻī, al-Umm (Beirut: Dār al-Maʻrifa, 1990), 4:74–98. 5 Ibn Qudāma, al-Mughnī (Cairo: Maktabat al-Qāhira, 1968), 6:228–320. 6 Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra al-nabawiyya, trans. Alfred Guillaume as The Life of Muhammad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 235–36. 7 N. J. Coulson, Succession in the Muslim Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 1–29. 8 J. Schacht and [A. Layish], “Mīrāth,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 7:106–13.