the child inherits from her and she, in turn, inherits from him.

When a person goes missing and no information about him can be obtained, his estate remains suspended until he would have reached seventy years of age—some say before eighty, others say before ninety, counting the years he had already lived. Once that presumptive age is reached, his property is transferred to his heirs, and any heir who dies before that point receives nothing of it.

If one of the absentee’s relatives dies leaving an estate, the portion that would have gone to the absentee is held in abeyance: should he later be proven alive, it is delivered to him; if instead the presumptive age passes, the deceased relative’s property goes to his own heirs, excluding both the absentee and the absentee’s heirs.

If the missing person’s son dies during his father’s absence, the father does not inherit from him. Ibn al-Qāsim, however, held that the father’s share should be set aside until it is known whether he is alive or dead; if no news appears, the son’s estate is then given to the son’s heirs.

Anyone who breaks an oath that triggers a disputed divorce and then dies before a judicial separation occurs is inherited by his wife, and had she died first, he would have inherited from her. For example, a man might swear, “Every woman I marry is divorced,” or, “Any woman I marry from such-and-such a town or tribe is divorced,” or, referring to a named woman, “If I marry her, she is divorced.” Should he nevertheless marry one of these women and the judge not separate them before his death, she inherits from him; conversely, had she predeceased him, he would have inherited from her.

If a father marries off his adult son without the son’s knowledge and then dies, the son and the woman do not inherit from one another.

Ibn al-Qāsim said: “The best statement I heard from Mālik—transmitted to me by people I trust—is that whenever a marriage may be annulled before consummation but is upheld after consummation, both inheritance and divorce take full legal effect. Thus, if a husband were to pronounce a triple divorce before consummation, the woman would not become lawful for him again until she had married another man.”

By contrast, any marriage that the law will not allow to stand because it is intrinsically forbidden entails neither divorce nor inheritance, whether consummation has taken place or not.

If a man divorces one of his four wives and then dies without anyone knowing which wife he had divorced, all four wives share his entire estate equally after first swearing the required oaths. Likewise, if a man with four wives divorces one of them, then marries a fifth, and subsequently dies while the identity of the divorced wife is unknown but the new wife is known, one-quarter of the estate goes to the known wife, and the remaining three-quarters are divided among the four wives, again after they have sworn their oaths.