Selling a dead author's manuscript to someone who wants to publish it under his own name

A question about selling a dead author's manuscript to someone who wants to publish it under his own name, in which Jordan's General Iftaa Department answered that the buyer may not attribute the book to himself, that the heirs may not sell it to him if they know this, and that they may sell the works and benefit from the proceeds provided they are printed under the author's name. ¹

The questioner described a man who wrote a book and died before publishing it; the manuscript was with his wife, and someone offered to buy it on condition that he publish it under his own name rather than the author's. ¹

The Department answered that the buyer of a deceased person's writings may not attribute them to himself, because it is deception and forgery, and it counted this as academic theft, relying on a hadith reported by al-Bukhari that one who boasts of what he was not given is like one wearing two garments of falsehood. ¹ It said that the heirs may not sell the works to him if they know he intends to claim them, and it quoted the resolution of the International Islamic Fiqh Academy at its fifth conference in Kuwait in 1409 AH/1988 that rights of authorship and invention are protected in the Sharia and their holders may dispose of them. ¹ It explained that the deceased's property, including authorship and intellectual property rights, passes at his death to his heirs according to their shares, and that selling permissible, beneficial books and manuscripts is allowed, citing al-Nawawi in al-Majmu (9/253) that books of hadith, fiqh, language, literature, medicine, arithmetic and other permissible useful subjects may be sold. ¹ It quoted resolution 48 of Jordan's Iftaa Council that an author's right passes to his heirs after his death, and concluded that the heirs may sell the works and benefit from their proceeds provided they are printed under the name of their deceased author, and may not sell them to someone who wants to claim them as his own. ¹

Jordan's General Iftaa Department published this fatwa on aliftaa.jo as no. 4192, dated 9 February 2026. ¹ The museum records this text as a historical document attributed to the body or scholar that issued it; it issues no ruling of its own.