Chapter on Inheritance (Mawarith)

The Islamic law of inheritance is one of the most mathematically precise systems in classical Islamic jurisprudence, distributing the estate of the deceased according to fixed Quranic shares and residual entitlements. Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani presents the foundational rules of inheritance (mawarith or fara'id) according to the Maliki school, which largely follows the same structure as the other three schools with some distinct positions.

Three conditions must be met for inheritance to occur: the death of the testator (the person leaving the estate), the survival of the heir at the time of death (or legal determination of survival), and the absence of a legal bar to inheritance. The legal bars to inheritance in Islam are three: killing the testator (in the Maliki school, intentional killing bars inheritance; some differentiate between direct killing and other circumstances), difference of religion (a Muslim does not inherit from a non-Muslim and vice versa, per the foundational hadith), and the status of slavery (a slave has no independent legal patrimony, though this is historically inapplicable today).

The Quranic heirs with fixed shares are specified in Surah al-Nisa' (verses 11, 12, and 176). They are: the daughter (one-half if sole, two-thirds if two or more), the son's daughter (same as daughter in relevant configurations), the full sister (one-half if sole, two-thirds for two or more, when there is no agnatic heir), the uterine siblings (one-third if two or more, one-sixth if one), the mother (one-third if no children or two+ siblings, otherwise one-sixth), the father (one-sixth if there is a child, residual if no child), the paternal grandfather (in the position of the father when the father is absent), the husband (one-half if no children, one-quarter if children), and the wife (one-quarter if no children, one-eighth if children).

The residual heirs (asabah) are those who take what remains after the fixed shares are distributed. They are the agnatic male relatives in order of priority: the son first, then the son's son, then the father, then the paternal grandfather, then the full brother, then the paternal half-brother, and so on. If there are no fixed-share heirs and no residual heirs, the estate goes to the distant relatives (dhawu'l-arham), and if there are none, to the public treasury (bayt al-mal).

The Maliki school has a distinctive position on the rights of the uterine relatives and the return (radd) of the estate surplus to the fixed-share heirs. The Maliki school does not apply radd (returning the surplus) to the spouse; the surplus is given to the public treasury or to distant relatives before reverting to the spouse. This is the Maliki school's position that distinguishes it from the Hanafi and Hanbali schools, which apply radd to some fixed-share heirs including the spouse.

The Maliki school also addresses the Grandfather-Brothers problem (masa'il al-jadd wa'l-ikhwah) — the competition between the paternal grandfather and the full and paternal-half brothers when there is no father — in the same way as the Shafi'i school: the grandfather takes priority over the brothers entirely, unlike the Hanafi school. The Maliki and Shafi'i schools hold that brothers are excluded by the grandfather, as the grandfather is in the 'father' class.