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If someone asks: “How can you deem this analogy valid as proof of the correctness of Mālik’s position when he does not accept what it entails? He includes the founder’s daughters among the beneficiaries of the endowment under this wording, whereas your interpretation, based on the likelihood that the founder does not know that a daughter is called a ‘child,’ would require their exclusion.”
The answer is that excluding daughters from an endowment is disapproved of because it is a practice of the pre-Islamic age of ignorance. Allah, Mighty and Majestic, says:
“They say, ‘What is in the wombs of these livestock is exclusively for our males and forbidden to our wives.’” [al-Anʿām: 139]
It also involves the prohibited practice of favouring some children over others in giving gifts. Mālik’s position—may Allah have mercy on him—is that daughters are included, even if the founder expressly stipulates their exclusion, provided it is not too late. How much more so, then, when he uses wording whose apparent meaning in Arabic requires their inclusion?
As for daughters’ children, excluding them from an endowment is not disapproved of. They must therefore not be included under this wording if it is considered most likely that the founder intended it to refer exclusively to males, judging by what is known of people’s intended meanings and customary speech—even though the wording would entail their inclusion because it applies to both males and females in Arabic. Thus, daughters are excluded from the endowment only by an explicit provision excluding them, whereas daughters’ children are included only by an explicit provision including them, or by general wording unaccompanied by anything indicating that daughters’ children are excepted from it.
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If someone were to establish an endowment for the children of an unrelated man, this analogy would require that the man’s daughters not be included. It is in accordance with this reasoning and analogy that Asbagh transmits from Ibn al-Qāsim, in the Book of Bequests, that if someone makes a bequest to the children of so-and-so, the bequest is for his male children, and his female children are not included,