I said, ‘O Messenger of Allah, I gave my mother a charitable gift, and she has now died.’ He replied, ‘Allah has accepted your charity, and it has returned to you through inheritance.’” They argued: Those who hold endowments to be permissible do not allow the endowed property to return to its donor. They further argued: An endowment divests ownership without vesting it in anyone else, so it must not be binding, by analogy with a sāʾibah or with someone saying, “I have relinquished ownership of this house.” Such a declaration does not remove the house from his ownership; the same therefore applies to the case under discussion. They also argued: Since an endowment relinquishes ownership of the benefit, it must not extinguish ownership of the underlying property, by analogy with a loan for use.

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None of this provides any evidence or valid argument. The property held under restrictions that Muhammad came to release consisted of the bahīrah, sāʾibah, wasīlah and hāmī—categories of livestock mentioned by Allah in His Book. The evidence for this is that these are what Sūrat al-Māʾidah mentions. This interpretation is reported from Mālik, may Allah have mercy on him.

As for Ibn ʿAbbās’s hadith, there are two answers:

The first is that it refers to the confinement of an unmarried person guilty of fornication. Allah, Mighty and Majestic, said:

“Confine them to their homes until death takes them or Allah ordains a way for them.” [al-Nisāʾ: 15]

The Prophet ﷺ then said, “Learn from me: Allah has now ordained a way for them. For an unmarried man and an unmarried woman: one hundred lashes and banishment for a year”—and the hadith continues.

The second answer, which is the one relied upon, is that it refers to prohibiting the practices concerning the bahīrah, sāʾibah, wasīlah and hāmī observed in the pre-Islamic era. For no one from that era is known to have endowed his house for his children or for any purpose through which one seeks to draw nearer to Allah Most High. As for