The importance of the Wakf model and the mosque

The wakf consists of a donation made by an individual or a group, with the intention that the income it generates will finance what they determine.
The details of its operation and the mechanisms for its continuity over time are written in a document that endorses a cadi.
I am not going to go into all the regulations that regulated them, this is a matter of study for those who are interested and it can be raised in another framework and at another time, insha Allah.
In the Ottoman Caliphate, and taking up the heritage of previous Muslim governments, they established a model of wakf called Imaret that always had a basic structure: The mosque and around it annexed pavilions that offered various free services such as madrasa, Koranic school, hamam, attention to travelers, dining room for the poor, hospice, etc.
To get an idea of how they were sustained, I will cite as an example the wakf endowment that built the Imaret and the Fatih mosque in Istanbul.
It had a donation for its construction and maintenance of 4250 shops, 3 large office buildings, 4 Turkish baths, 7 villas, a covered market that included 9 gardens and 1130 houses.
Much of the Ottoman territory came to be dedicated towkafs, and I will cite some examples of what awkafs covered that worked for centuries and some, to this day, are still functioning.

• Hospitals, orphanages and food houses.
• Public fountains, bridges, aqueducts and roads.
• Universities, schools, libraries.
• Zawiyyas
• Caravansarais, or inns, throughout the territory at a day’s travel distance, in which travelers had the right to lodging, medical and veterinary services.
• Storage of food for birds and wolves in the winter seasons.
• Trousseau for brides without means, payments for possible damage caused by children in their games or by servants in the performance of their work.

The wakf has an important political dimension because, when constituting the wakf, the founder or founders must draw up a document, which endorses the cadi, in which the terms in which it is to be put into practice are established, in great detail.
This implies, and I repeat the words of Sidi Karim, rahimullah, that each wakf has an independent and unalterable constitution, in which the government has no possibility of interfering.
This, for example, in education would imply that the government would not have the authority to alter the programs.
Or in the caravanserais to change the beneficiaries or the rules.
They covered services free of charge that currently the most advanced developed societies do not cover by a long shot.
And all these services are framed in the structure of the State, in ministries of Public Works, Social Security, Education or the Environment.
Financed through tax-based State Budgets, which the State redistributes according to its criteria.
In the current political circumstances, a functioning in which the distribution of wealth is carried out by individuals on their own initiative seems unfeasible.
Capitalist society is under the imperative of the equation of John Forbes Nash, Nobel laureate in mathematics and schizophrenic, who turned the principle “The individual is rational, selfish and insatiable”, into the mathematical equation that currently governs microeconomics, from which macroeconomics and the law of supply and demand are derived. that is taught in the Faculties of Economics from the first year of my degree and that has already left the field of economics and is even applied to biology.
Each society is the expression of those who compose it, but at the same time it is the mold with which it forges its components.
Capitalism has managed to forge an individual who has delegated his freedom and personal responsibilities to the hands of the State and who has allowed, and at the same time is a victim, of the trans-valuation of values, opening the door to individualistic and commodified human relations loaded with usury: to give regardless of what is to be received; and the less you give and the more you receive, the better business you have done.
Freedom is limited to your own body – you can get tattooed, define your sexuality… And political responsibility, the vote with which you decide who is going to manage your wealth.
I recommend a BBC report by Adam Curtis, “Hypernormalization”.
He is profoundly nihilistic, but even he, looking for ways out of this apparently unbreakable knot, timidly says that the only thing that could endanger this state of affairs would be individuals who set out to function by denying the principles of the Forbes equation; that they behaved without the imperative of rationalism, that they were not selfish or insatiable; that they decided to abandon individualism and cooperate.
Many young people who now declare themselves “anti-capitalist” are looking back to communism, without taking into account what its development has shown us historically.
It was not a misapplication of communism that made it fail, but its concept of existence, which is nothing but the other side of the same coin of capitalism. The first thing that needs to be pointed out in the awkafs is that they are the expression of a human being who has an understanding of existence opposite to that dictated to us by capitalist society.
Sheykh Abdel Qadir as Sufi defines “sub-humans” as those who do not have in their existence the other plane of our reality that is “the unseen”.
And it is not an insult, it is a definition of those who function in the world ignoring a part of their existential reality.
The one who has this knowledge knows that the increase in his wealth lies in giving and not in accumulating.
He knows that his actions have an impact on this plane of life and on the other plane, the unseen, and that his reward is not limited to this world, but has a continuity after death.
This is the spirit that feeds the wakf, because it consists of a sadaqa that will continue to function after death.
The awakfs are an expression of a spirit that exercises its freedom, takes its affairs and those of its society in its own hands, to the best of its ability, and does not meekly wait for the state to resolve them.
And that trusts that its reward, both immediate and last, does not depend on mathematical equations, but on the Generosity of its Creator.
In Turkey, awkafs founded in the sixteenth century are still operating.
Delegating its management to the people of Sufism has been a tradition that has been followed over centuries and has guaranteed its continuity.
These awkafs have been passed from sheykh to sheykh, who have taken care of them and managed their resources to make them profitable to this day.
And even now, when Turkey has a pro-Muslim government, which covers many aspects of those that have traditionally been covered by awkafs, awkafs are still being established.
Perhaps in our Andalusian tradition we still remember how the neighbors used to water their streets themselves and beautify them, help each other in the whitewashing of the houses, to manage their festivals and to be attentive to the sick.
And we continue to see examples of Muslims taking matters into their own hands.
I was impressed by Mohammed Badir’s public statement a few days ago in the US.
As a representative of the Muslim Community of Tampa Bay in Florida, he has appealed to the Trump Administration in which the community offers to take in the 2300 children of Latin American migrants separated from their parents and confined in cages.
They have offered to pay all the transport costs and hundreds of families to take them into their bosom and bear all their expenses while the reunification with their parents or relatives is managed.
When Sheyj Abdel Qadir as Sufi declares “The Interim is mine”, he is talking to us about a possibility: to take the space that opens up in a collapsing society.
This is the spirit, the knowledge, that can offer the world and ourselves an alternative to the collapse of the system.

Lecture given by Jadiya Martínez at the XV Islam Meeting in Europe, at the Great Mosque of Granada