38 – The Book of Walāʾ (Patronage through Emancipation)

If a man emancipates his slave, the walāʾ belongs to him; the same applies when a woman sets a slave free. Should the emancipator stipulate that the freedman is a sāʾiba (released with no patronage), the stipulation is null and the walāʾ remains with the one who carried out the manumission.

When a mukatab completes his payments he becomes fully free and his walāʾ reverts to the master. The same holds if his freedom takes effect after the master’s death: the walāʾ then passes to the master’s heirs. If the master himself dies, any slave he had made mudabbar and every umm walad are automatically freed, and their walāʾ belongs to him. Likewise, whoever comes to own a close blood relative whom he is forbidden to marry must set that person free, and the walāʾ is his.

If a slave owned by one man marries a slave-girl belonging to another, and the owner of the slave-girl emancipates her while she is pregnant by that slave, she and the fetus in her womb are both free, and the walāʾ of the unborn child belongs permanently to the mother’s emancipator. If, more than six months after her emancipation, she bears a child, the walāʾ of that child still goes to the mother’s emancipator. Should the father-slave later be emancipated, he draws the walāʾ of his son to himself, so that it moves from the mother’s patron to the father’s patron.

If a non-Arab man marries his Arab mistress who had emancipated him and she bears him children, the walāʾ of those children, according to Abū Ḥanīfah, belongs to her own patrons.

Walāʾ established through emancipation is an agnatic bond: if the freedman has an agnatic relative by blood, that relative has a stronger claim than the emancipator. If the freedman has no such relative, his estate passes to the emancipator.

If he dies,