any descendants remain of their father, from whom the endowment passed to him, or of his mother, from whom it passed to him. In that case, the surviving descendants are entitled to their mother’s or father’s share, since they are covered by his words: “Any of them who dies leaving a child or a grandchild.”

Know that unless the wording is understood in this way, this person’s share would constitute an endowment whose ultimate beneficiaries are unspecified, for he said:

“Any of them who dies leaving a child, his share shall belong to his child, then to his grandchild, then to his descendants and posterity.”

He did not specify to whom it would pass after that line of descendants died out. However, at the end of the stipulation, he made clear that it would not pass to the captives and the poor until the descendants of all four had died out. These words therefore imply that it is to be allocated to the descendants. These two women are among those descendants, stand in the same degree of kinship, and are the only ones remaining. They must therefore share in it.

Beyond these two interpretations, the only remaining possibility is that his words, “Any of them who dies,” refer to the four and their descendants. It would then be said: Aynāshī died leaving a paternal half-sister and a paternal uncle’s daughter, so the share would belong to her sister. This interpretation is unquestionably invalid; if a judge were to rule on that basis, his judgment would not be enforceable.

For the pronoun in the first occurrence, “Any of them who dies,” refers to the four. Thus, the pronoun in the second occurrence, “Any of them who dies,” likewise refers to those four. For if someone says:

“Of these four, whoever does such and such, do such and such for him; and whoever does such and such, do such and such for his child,”

it is necessarily understood that the second pronoun has the same referent as the first.

Furthermore, he said:

“Any of them who dies without a child, his share shall revert