The word waqf usually calls to mind buildings of stone: a mosque, a madrasa, a fountain or a caravanserai. The Ottoman endowment system also had a branch that rested not on stone but on money itself: the cash waqfs. A benefactor endowed a fixed sum, the capital was invested so that it would not diminish, and the return was spent on the service named in the deed. Because the capital was lent out to people in need, these institutions worked, in a society that regarded interest as forbidden, both as charities and as small-scale sources of credit. In Amasya and its surroundings a great many such foundations were established; the number reflected in the research is 188, between 1633 and 1914.

What Is a Cash Waqf

In Ottoman legal language a cash waqf was called "vakfü'n-nukûd" or "evkaf-ı nukûd". Nukûd is the plural of nakd, cash, and refers to the two metals taken as the basis in Islamic law, gold and silver coin. Small coins struck from other metals could be used in daily trade, but in deferred transactions the standard was gold and silver. In a cash waqf the benefactor endowed a given sum of money, and the deed stated how the money was to be invested and which charity its income would serve. The capital remained the property of the foundation, while the profit went, for example, to the salary of a mosque's imam, the expenses of a primary school, or the pay of those who recited the Qur'an.

What set this arrangement apart from real-estate waqfs was that founding one did not require a large property. To endow a field, a shop or a han one needed wealth; a person with modest savings could endow the money in hand and keep his name alive in prayer. For this reason researchers regard cash waqfs as an innovation that, from the fifteenth century onward, allowed less wealthy people to found endowments too. A cash waqf also avoided a problem that afflicted immovable endowments: shops and houses could be ruined by fire, whereas cash could not burn. This was one of the arguments used by the scholars who defended the cash waqf.

The Ban on Interest and the Need for Credit

To understand how cash waqfs arose, one must first look at the problems of borrowing. In Islamic law, lending to a person in need without return (qard) was a meritorious act, but interest (riba) was forbidden. The lender bore the risk of not getting his money back, and money was not always easy to find. In the end it had become hard to expect people to lend purely in hope of reward. A person short of cash who could not find a benevolent loan (qard-ı hasen) turned to transactions in which a property was sold with the right of buying it back (bay' bi'l-vefâ) or was handed over for use in return for income (bay' bi'l-istiglâl); for these, too, he needed real estate. For the propertyless majority there was no institutional source of credit, and the door often opened onto the moneylender.

Cash waqfs filled this gap. Because the capital was set aside for a charitable purpose, the money lent out was not regarded as a personal favour but as a transaction conducted by the foundation's trustee (mütevelli) under set rules. Since the rates of return were fixed by the state, the burden on the borrower was known in advance. Cash waqfs therefore did more than supply credit; they offered a lawful alternative to the moneylender who preyed on the public. Avariz waqfs were founded to cover the losses caused by disasters or sudden taxes, and the middle funds (orta sandıkları) that Janissaries, tradesmen and harem eunuchs formed among themselves worked on the same logic, providing credit and retirement pay. In these respects cash waqfs also served as a kind of social insurance.

The Debate in Hanafi Law

In the Hanafi school, the official school of the Ottomans, the cash waqf was not readily accepted. According to Imam Abu Hanifa and Imam Abu Yusuf, the things that could be endowed were limited to immovables and to those movables for which a textual authority on endowment existed. Imam Muhammad al-Shaybani accepted that movables whose endowment had become customary among people could also be endowed; axes, cauldrons, funeral equipment and copies of the Qur'an are given as examples. In the view attributed to Imam Zufar, the endowment of dirhams, foodstuffs and goods sold by measure or weight was valid; the money was to be put to work and the profit given to the cause for which it was endowed. In Hanafi works this view is mostly described as weak. Among the Malikis the reliable opinion, and among part of the Shafi'i and Hanbali jurists as well, is that the cash waqf is permissible.

The first known practices on Ottoman soil go back to the reigns of Murad II and Mehmed the Conqueror. One of the oldest cash waqfs identified in the court registers dates from 1423: in Edirne, Yağcı Hacı Muslihüddin endowed 10,000 akçe and stipulated that three people who recited the Qur'an every day at the Kilise Mosque should each receive one akçe from its income. The income of a cash waqf founded by Mehmed the Conqueror was assigned to the meat supply of the Janissaries. As long as their numbers and volume were small, these foundations caused no serious dispute among jurists. Only toward the middle of the sixteenth century, when they had gained weight within the endowment system, did their legitimacy come under discussion.

The first treatise written on the subject belongs to İbn Kemal (Kemalpaşazade), who served as şeyhülislam from 1526 until his death in 1534. In this short text İbn Kemal notes that the mujtahid imams disagreed about the endowment of dirhams and dinars while the practice was spreading, and says that he prefers the view of permissibility. In his opinion the difference among the imams was not a real disagreement but one produced by the changing of the age; had Abu Hanifa and his companions lived in his own time, they would have given a fatwa like Zufar's. In the second part of the treatise he stresses that a judgment given by one judge cannot be overturned by another; thus, once a judge had registered a cash waqf on the basis of Zufar's view, the other judges were bound to treat it as valid. Ebüssuûd Efendi later adopted İbn Kemal's arguments and developed the subject in more detail.

The Dispute Between Çivizâde and Ebüssuûd

The real controversy came about ten years after İbn Kemal's death, in the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent. Çivizâde Muhyiddin Efendi, who had served as şeyhülislam but was dismissed because his words about Ibn Arabi and Rumi displeased the sultan, was appointed kazasker of Rumelia when Ebüssuûd Efendi became şeyhülislam in 1545. A severe and conservative scholar, Çivizâde argued that Zufar's opinion was weak and, during his term as kazasker, succeeded in having cash waqfs banned. The kazasker was a member of the imperial council and had executive power.

In response, Kemalpaşazade and his student Ebüssuûd Efendi each wrote a treatise on the permissibility and usefulness of cash waqfs, and Çivizâde answered with a rebuttal. Sofyalı Bâlî Efendi, a Khalwati sheikh, wrote letters to the sultan, to Çivizâde and to Çivizâde's leading student Şah Çelebi, explaining that the ban made no sense and would damage the endowment system. One of his points was this: the practice had lasted for centuries, fatwas had been given according to the needs of the time, and it was inconceivable that the scholars should have agreed on an error for three centuries. The words of Fenarizâde Muhyiddin Çelebi, one of those who held the office of şeyhülislam after Çivizâde, are also reported. Çivizâde asked him for a fatwa; Fenarizâde, retired by then on account of age, said that many madrasas, mosques, schools and soup kitchens had been founded thanks to cash waqfs, that all would fall into ruin if they were forbidden, that the people employed there would be in difficulty, and, recalling the roughly ten thousand deeds already written, asked: "They did not know, and Çivizâde did?" Çivizâde did not give up his view.

The resolution came with Çivizâde's death. After Çivizâde died in 1547, Ebüssuûd Efendi discussed the matter with the leading scholars of the day, including the kazaskers of Rumelia and Anatolia, obtained the agreement of all of them, and presented his fatwa on freeing the cash waqfs to the sultan. The fatwa was turned into an imperial edict and proclaimed in the form of a law in May 1548; cash waqfs thereby became an official and binding practice. That Ebüssuûd made no such move while Çivizâde was alive has been read as an act of courtesy, and given that the şeyhülislam outranked the kazasker, the reading is plausible. Those who held the opposite view were neither prosecuted nor lost standing.

The debate did not end entirely. Birgivî Mehmed Efendi, who lived in a small town in the Aegean, wrote two treatises against cash waqfs. He criticised both the validity of the endowment and the methods by which the money was invested, arguing that usurious transactions were being carried out unwittingly in the management of endowed funds. Birgivî's objection did not affect practice; cash waqfs continued until the end of the Ottoman state.

How the Capital Was Invested

Deeds named three ways of putting the capital to work. Bida'a was a form of investment in which the whole profit belonged to the owner of the capital; mudaraba was a partnership of labour and capital in which the profit was shared in a ratio agreed beforehand. But since capital could be lost, these two methods are risky, and they are also long-term; trustees, finding them unsuitable for meeting a foundation's needs, hardly used them at all. Judging by the account books, endowed money was in practice invested through muamele-i şer'iyye, istiglâl and ferağ bi'l-istiglâl.

The commonest of these was muamele-i şer'iyye. The money a borrower asked for was given as a loan (qard), and in addition a cheap article such as a pen, a handkerchief or a book was sold to him on credit at a high price. The surplus was called interest, but it was not considered the riba forbidden by the sharia. The state fixed the rate according to the supply of money. It is recorded as 10 per cent under Süleyman the Magnificent, 15 per cent under Sultan Abdülmecid, and 9 per cent by the Murabaha Regulation of 1887. The court registers show that judges did not award interest demanded without a muamele-i şer'iyye transaction. In later times Ottoman banks worked by the same method: the clerk at the counter would sell on credit to a customer who asked for a loan of 100 liras a pen, a watch or, more often, a book, for 9 liras, and then lend the amount requested, so that the customer ended up owing the bank 109 liras.

Research shows that cash waqfs financed not only consumption but also small-scale production. It may be assumed that the same picture held for Amasya, but who the individual borrowers were and for what purpose they borrowed is not recorded in the sources on which this article rests.

The Services the Foundations Provided

The services paid for by cash waqfs were mostly small in scale but required continuity. In most foundations the salaries of teachers and imams were paid from this return. Bayezid II had a condition written into the deed of the madrasa he built in Istanbul that the şeyhülislam would receive a fee from a cash waqf in return for teaching one day a week. Şeyhülislam Sa'di Efendi himself founded a cash waqf and stipulated that its profit be given to two students of a Qur'an-memorisation school, each of whom would recite one section a day at the grave of his mother and father. Cash waqfs thus also served to support the learned class materially.

The Istanbul court registers contain close to 5,000 cash waqf entries. This scale shows that the 188 foundations of Amasya were a provincial part of a wide institutional network. Operations in the provinces must have been simpler: the imam's salary at a neighbourhood mosque, the pay of a schoolteacher, or the costs of religious services were met from a foundation's yearly return.

Cash Waqfs in Amasya and Its Surroundings

The most comprehensive study for Amasya is the article published in 2023 by Ömer Sait Türkmen. Türkmen examined 188 cash waqfs established in Amasya and its surroundings between 1633 and 1914. The material on which the research rests is chiefly the Amasya Şer'iye Sicilleri, of which twenty-one volumes were surveyed. The Gümüşhacıköy and Merzifon court registers (two volumes each) and the deed registers in the archive of the General Directorate of Foundations are also among the study's foundations. "Amasya and its surroundings" therefore covers not only the town centre but the foundations that appear in the records of these districts.

According to the article's abstract, these foundations were established to ensure the continuity of the buildings and services of religious and social institutions serving in neighbourhoods or villages. That mosque and masjid appear among the study's keywords shows that the foundations were attached chiefly to such buildings. At the same time they met the cash needs of the people where they were established and, through fixed rates of return, prevented excessive usury. The article also sets out to treat the number of foundations, the characteristics and social standing of the founders, the sums endowed and the purposes served. Because the sources on which this text relies do not give details such as the individual names of founders, the amounts endowed or how many foundations existed in which neighbourhood, they are not given here; a reader who wants them should consult Türkmen's article and the court registers concerned.

The chosen time span covers a period of three hundred years. Over that time, a person who wished to settle a regular income on the mosque of his neighbourhood or the school of his village must often have chosen the cash waqf. The third volume of Hüsameddin's Amasya Tarihi is cited among the works consulted by those who study the town's endowments and charitable works; Türkmen also includes it in his bibliography.

Similar studies have been made for other places. The cash waqfs of Bursa between 1553 and 1823, and the practice in centres such as Üsküdar in the age of Süleyman, Gümüşhane, Rize, Samsun, Konya and Cyprus, have been the subject of separate studies. These make it possible to compare the foundations of Amasya with the general picture in Anatolia; even so, the results for one town cannot be applied directly to another.

Erosion and Passage to the State

Most cash waqfs eroded over time, because loans were not repaid or because of inflation. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, some foundation administrators deposited cash in the Ottoman Bank on behalf of their foundations in order to make it earn. In the Constitutional period the total of the cash waqfs in Istanbul stood at 60,000 to 70,000 gold liras. On the proposal of Evkaf Minister Ürgüplü Hayri Efendi this money was seized and made capital for the Evkaf Bank founded in 1914; when war broke out the bank could not operate. In the Republican period the sum, which had reached 190,000 liras, was transferred to the General Directorate of Foundations and covered part of the capital of Vakıfbank, founded in 1954.

How the Amasya foundations took part in this process, which of them were still operating in 1914, and whether their capital was transferred to the Evkaf Bank is not told in the sources consulted. What is known is that the time span of the Amasya study ends in 1914.

Chronology

1423: In Edirne, Yağcı Hacı Muslihüddin endows 10,000 akçe; it is one of the oldest known cash waqfs.

1526: İbn Kemal becomes şeyhülislam; the first treatise on the permissibility of the cash waqf is his. He dies in 1534.

1545: Ebüssuûd Efendi becomes şeyhülislam; Çivizâde, as kazasker of Rumelia, has cash waqfs banned.

1547: Çivizâde dies.

May 1548: Ebüssuûd Efendi's fatwa is proclaimed as law in the form of an imperial edict.

1633-1914: The span of the 188 cash waqfs established in Amasya and its surroundings.

1887: The Murabaha Regulation fixes the rate at 9 per cent.

1914: The Evkaf Bank is founded; the cash waqfs of Istanbul are seized.

1954: Vakıfbank is founded.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Hüsameddin. Amasya Tarihi, III. Cilt. Amasya Belediyesi Kültür Yayınları, 2007.

Academic studies

  • Türkmen, Ömer Sait. "Amasya ve Çevresinde Kurulan Para Vakıfları Üzerine Bir İnceleme." Uluslararası Sosyal ve Eğitim Bilimleri Dergisi 20 (2023): 1-21.
  • Özcan, Tahsin. "İbn Kemal'in Para Vakıflarına Dair Risalesi." İslam Araştırmaları Dergisi 4 (2000): 31-41.

Other sources

  • Ekinci, Ekrem Buğra. "Osmanlılarda Bir Faizsiz Kredi Kaynağı: Para Vakıfları."
  • TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "Vakıf" entry. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • İKAM. "Osmanlıda Para Vakıfları ve Nakit İşletme Yöntemleri."

Online sources