He replied:

Praise be to Allah. The governing principle here is that every act stipulated under an endowment established to support particular activities must be an act of devotion—either obligatory or recommended. A stipulation requiring a prohibited act is invalid by agreement of the Muslim scholars. The same applies to a disliked act and, according to the correct view, to a merely permissible act as well. Muslims agree that an endowment founder’s stipulations, like conditions in other contracts, may be either valid or invalid.

When some jurists say that an endowment founder’s stipulations are texts comparable to the wording of the Lawgiver, they mean that they resemble scriptural texts in indicating the founder’s intent, not in being obligatory to implement. That is, the founder’s intent is understood from the wording of his stipulations, just as the Lawgiver’s intent is understood from His wording. Thus, just as generality and specificity, unrestricted and qualified meanings, joint inclusion and ordering are understood in the Sharia from the Lawgiver’s wording, so too are they understood in an endowment from its founder’s wording.

The precise position, however, is that the wording of an endowment founder, a person swearing an oath, an intercessor, a testator, or any contracting party is to be understood according to that person’s customary manner of expression and the language they speak—whether pure Arabic, later-developed Arabic, grammatically incorrect Arabic, or a language other than Arabic, and whether or not it accords with the Lawgiver’s usage. The purpose of words is to convey the intent of those who utter them. We therefore need to understand the Lawgiver’s speech, because knowledge of His language, customary usage, and manner of expression enables us to understand His intent. The same applies to