Transaction of Endowment

It is one of the definite issues in fiqh and accepted by intellect and Muslims’ common sense that an endowed property cannot be sold or given as a gift. In addition to this intellectual reason, there are some textual reasons such as “endowed properties should be managed according to what the endower has intended” and that transaction of endowed property violates the rights of whom the property has been endowed for, all of which denotes that transaction of endowed properties is not permissible. However, there are exceptions to this general rule such as where the endowed property is destroyed or there is a severe dispute among the beneficiaries or the endower has mentioned that the property must be sold if a specific event occurs under which the transaction of endowed property would be permissible. In all these cases, there are different possibilities which have been addressed in this article in detail.