of each one of them was firmly established with certainty, and the basic presumption is that it remained in place until after the other person’s death. Furthermore, when the plague broke out in Syria during the caliphate of ʿUmar—may Allah be pleased with him—entire households were dying one after another. The matter was reported to ʿUmar, and he ordered that they should inherit from one another.

For this reciprocal inheritance to be effected, the heirs of those whose sequence of death is uncertain must not differ—each set of heirs claiming that their relative died later while no proof exists. Should such a dispute arise, they must all take oaths, and no inheritance is awarded.

According to this view, the method of distribution is as follows: each decedent is made to inherit from the other’s settled property—that is, the property he already possessed—without touching the new property he himself inherited from those who died with him in the incident. One begins by assuming that a particular person died first; his original estate is divided among his surviving heirs and those who perished with him. Whatever share thereby allocated to someone who also died in the calamity is then redistributed among that person’s surviving heirs only, excluding anyone who died alongside him, so that no one inherits his own property. The process is then reversed with the second decedent: you assume he died first and apply to him exactly what was applied to the first.

The sounder opinion in this matter, however, is the first: that there is no reciprocal inheritance. Inheritance cannot be established on the basis of conjecture and doubt, and in the present case the factual circumstances of the deaths are unknown—what is unknown is treated as nonexistent. The precedence of one death over another here is likewise unknown and therefore nonexistent.

Moreover, inheritance is granted to the living so that he may succeed the deceased and benefit from his property after him, and that purpose is absent here, together with the contradictions that would ensue from holding that they inherit from one another.