Waqf

An Islamic endowment: land or property dedicated to religious or charitable use in perpetuity, legally inalienable under Islamic law. The Jordanian-funded Jerusalem Islamic Waqf has administered the Temple Mount since before 1967, an arrangement Israel kept in place after capturing the Old City.

Etymology and legal meaning

Waqf (وقف), plural awqaf, comes from the Arabic root meaning “to stop” or “to hold.” Under classical sharia, a waqf is created when an owner permanently dedicates property, land, a building, income, to a religious or charitable purpose, most commonly the upkeep of a mosque, school, hospital, or cemetery. Once declared, the property cannot legally be sold, inherited, or given away; it is held forever by God, administered by a trustee called a mutawalli. The institution dates to the earliest centuries of Islam and became the backbone of mosque endowments, religious schools, and public services across the Ottoman Empire, which by the 19th century controlled roughly a fifth of all cultivated land in the empire through waqf holdings.

The Jerusalem Islamic Waqf

The waqf that controls the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock traces its modern custodianship to the Hashemite kings of Jordan, who administered East Jerusalem and the Old City from 1948 to 1967. During those 19 years, Jordan barred Jews from the Western Wall and Old City entirely and destroyed or desecrated dozens of synagogues in the Jewish Quarter. After Israel took the Old City in the Six-Day War of June 1967, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan chose to leave day-to-day religious administration of the Temple Mount with the Jordanian-appointed Waqf rather than assert Israeli religious control, while Israel retained overall security authority. That division, sometimes called the status quo, has held for nearly six decades: the Waqf runs the mosques and bars non-Muslim prayer on the compound, and Israeli police secure the site and its approaches. Jordan still funds and appoints the Waqf’s senior clergy today, formalized in a 2013 agreement with the Palestinian Authority, even though Israel has held sovereignty over the site since 1967.

How the term gets stretched

The 1988 Hamas Covenant takes the narrow legal concept and inflates it to a territorial claim: Article 11 declares the entire land of historic Palestine an Islamic waqf consecrated for all Muslim generations, “until Judgment Day,” that no ruler or organization has the right to relinquish. That is not classical waqf law, which applies to specific dedicated properties, not entire countries; it is a political argument dressed in religious language, built to rule out negotiation or land compromise in principle before any talks begin. The same rhetorical move surfaces whenever a claim is made that the Temple Mount was “always” exclusively Muslim ground, a framing addressed directly in was Jerusalem always an Arab city and the Temple Mount always Muslim, against extensive archaeological evidence of the two Jewish Temples on the same site.

Related pages

• Temple Mount
• Al-Aqsa Mosque
• Dome of the Rock
• Hamas
• Was Jerusalem always an Arab city and the Temple Mount always Muslim?
• Israel vs. Hamas, in their words

Sources

• The 1988 Hamas Covenant, Article 11 (Avalon Project, Yale)
• Jewish Virtual Library: the Temple Mount
• Jordan’s desecration of Jerusalem, 1948 to 1967 (Jewish Virtual Library)
• Jewish Virtual Library: the Six-Day War, background and overview
• Archaeological evidence of the Jewish Temples (Temple Mount Sifting Project)