Strategies against a wrong, and how well they worked

Choose a measure before you judge: was the wrong put right, did the remedy last, who benefited, who was left out. Then ask what evidence the record gives for each measure and what it does not.

Read one remedy in action. According to the record of Hilf al-Fudul, it is said that a man from Zabid came to Mecca with merchandise; al-As ibn Wa'il al-Sahmi bought it from him and withheld his due. The man appealed for help to the confederates, but they paid him no heed ^2 3. He climbed Abu Qubays and called out verses describing his grievance, raising his voice. Al-Zubayr ibn Abd al-Muttalib took up the matter and said that this could not be left. The men named in the pact gathered, went to al-As ibn Wa'il, and took the Zabidi's due from him, after they had concluded the pact ^2 3. The pledge they made was to stand with every wronged person in Mecca until his wrong was returned to him ^4 5. The record gives the cause in the form "it is said", as its author does.

What prompted the pact? Safi al-Rahman al-Mubarakpuri gives the cause as the case of the man from Zabid, in the form "it is said" ². Abu al-Hasan al-Nadwi, telling the story from Ibn Kathir's Sira, holds that it was prompted not by one man's case but by unease at the disorder and mistrust in and around Mecca, especially after the Fijar war, and by the need for security, respect for rights, and protection of strangers and visiting traders and craftsmen ⁶. The record keeps both accounts. Which measure of success would each one lead you to apply?

Waqf is defined as an act by which an owner locks the capital of his property away from sale, gift and inheritance, and gives its yield to a good cause for ever, and it is easy to picture property frozen in place. The TDV encyclopedia says that archive-based studies in the second half of the twentieth century showed that waqf property was not frozen but moved as part of the market, through exchange (istibdal), allocation (irsad) and other means ⁷. It also says that successive states sometimes tried to lay hands on waqf funds but mostly protected them ⁷, and that in the nineteenth century the Western powers that occupied Muslim lands described waqf as harmful to the economy, after which a century was spent liquidating endowments and making them saleable ⁷.

The record of waqf rests on al-Bukhari's report of Umar's gift and on two articles of the TDV encyclopedia, one on the law and one on the history ^8 7. Its figures are counts of what was built and budgeted: al-Maqrizi counted 158 endowed colleges and mosques in Cairo in 1436, and the waqf budget of the Ottoman state reached a third of the state budget ⁷. The sources read know of nothing that survives of Umar's land at Khaybar. The record of Hilf al-Fudul rests on al-Mubarakpuri, Ibn Hisham and al-Najdi, and it does not say how long the pact held or whether later wrongs were put right. Ask which measure each record can speak to and which it cannot.

Choose a measure before you judge: was the wrong put right, did the remedy last, who benefited, who was left out. By the measure "was the wrong put right", the record of Hilf al-Fudul shows one case, in which the Zabidi's due was taken from al-As ibn Wa'il ². By the measure "did the remedy last", the TDV encyclopedia says that the waqf system shaped Muslim societies from the mid-eighth to the late nineteenth century ⁷. Take a position: which of the two strategies has the stronger evidence of working, and what is the strongest objection to your position?

• Hilf al-Fudul: the pledge, the case of the man from Zabid and the two accounts of what prompted it.
• Waqf: how an endowment was set up, what was built on it and how it fared from the Abbasids to the nineteenth century.
• Asabiyya: the tribal solidarity that the author of The Sealed Nectar sets against the spirit of this pact.