the emancipator’s benevolence toward his slave in granting him freedom—whether the manumission is carried out immediately or made conditional, whether it is voluntary or obligatory, even when accomplished through a kitābah contract. This is affirmed by the ḥadith of Barīrah in which the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said, “Walāʾ belongs only to the one who manumits.” (Agreed upon).

2. Walāʾ is a lasting bond and attachment, like the bond of lineage in its continuity and legal effects. It may neither be given away as a gift nor inherited in its own right; rather, inheritance takes place by means of it. While enslaved, a person is virtually non-existent in the legal sense—owning nothing and unable to dispose of property. Once his master sets him free, he becomes a fully recognized person, capable of ownership and transaction, thereby recovering his rights after having himself been owned.

3. If a freedman dies without any blood heirs—neither fixed-share heirs nor agnates—his estate goes to his emancipator, if the latter is alive. Failing that, it passes to the emancipator’s own agnatic relatives who inherit in their own right, not through (nor alongside) someone else. When the estate devolves, by virtue of walāʾ, to the emancipator’s agnates, it is taken by the nearest male agnate, then the next nearest, to the exclusion of females—for no woman inherits by agnation in her own right except one who has herself performed a manumission, or the freedman of a person she has manumitted.

4. As noted earlier, inheritance through walāʾ applies only when the freedman leaves no agnatic heir by blood and the fixed shares do not consume the entire estate. In that case, the emancipator inherits the whole estate by agnation. If the freedman has only fixed-share heirs and no blood agnate, the emancipator receives whatever remains after the shares are distributed; if nothing remains, his claim is nullified, just like any other agnate.

5. The majority of scholars hold that walāʾ establishes inheritance in a single direction—namely, from the freedman to the emancipator—because the latter is the benefactor, and the right is therefore confined to him. Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah, however, maintained that the mawlā min asfal (the freedman) also inherits from the emancipator when no other heirs exist, a view adopted by some jurists and by our teacher ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Saʿdī (d. AH). Their proof is the report narrated by the Five compilers except al-Nasāʾī, deemed ḥasan by al-Tirmidhī, in which Ibn ʿAbbās relates that a man died in the Prophet’s lifetime leaving no heir except a slave he had emancipated; the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) awarded the estate to that freed slave. They also invoked the general wording of the Prophet’s statement, “Walāʾ is a bond like the bond of lineage.” Since the Prophet likened it to kinship, they argued, it should carry the same legal ruling.