In the name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful.

The Book of Walāʾ (Clientage)

Walāʾ is a bond akin to blood kinship: it can neither be altered, sold, nor given away, and it is inherited through agnatic succession. Heirs who receive only a fixed Qurʾānic share have no claim to it alongside the agnates.

Those entitled to inherit walāʾ are the sons, their male descendants, the father, the grandfather, the full and paternal brothers—whether they share both parents or only the father—and their descendants. In Mālik’s view, the order of precedence in inheriting walāʾ is: the son and his male issue, then the father, then the brothers and their male issue (because they are the father’s sons), then the grandfather, then the paternal uncle (as he is the father’s brother), and after him his sons in sequence. Daughters and sisters inherit nothing of walāʾ.

Women inherit walāʾ only in respect of slaves they themselves have freed and of those later emancipated by the people they had manumitted. The client of a woman’s client is treated as her own client when her liberator is neither free nor alive, and the child of her client stands in the same position as the client himself, from whom she likewise inherits.

If a woman emancipates a slave she owns, the slave’s walāʾ and estate belong to her son and his male descendants, not to her wider agnatic relatives, although the payment of blood-money (ʿaql) remains the responsibility of those agnates. Should the woman’s sons and grandsons die out, the walāʾ does not pass to their agnates but reverts to her own agnatic kin.

When a full brother secures the estate of his client—whom that brother himself had emancipated—to the exclusion of a paternal half-brother, and then dies leaving a son, he did not—