Need for establishing waqf funds providing house for needy people
Donyaye eqtesad: Dr. Sadeqi Shahedani, editor in chief of the scientific- research Quarterly Journal of Economics and Urban Management addressed the issue of necessity for establishing waqf funds providing house for needy people. Following is the full text:
Waqf is a good tradition and one of the honors of rich culture of Islam and one of the efficient ideological and cultural levers in order to compensate the economic needs of the society. In terms of religious waqf is that someone holds his property and devotes its benefit to the society, person or individuals.
The institution of waqf has had an effective role in the formation of constructing cities and villages’ spaces. Many rural and urban infrastructure facilities have been built by people. If we remove public spaces and public benefit formed by waqf in the traditional structure of Iran, there would be nothing but housing and commercial centers. Therefore, waqf has played its role in creating the smallest structural elements of the city and village like mosques, schools, baths, water reservoir, Saqakhaneh, hospitals, street lighting, bridges and markets. Thus, waqf has provided essential conditions and substructures for presenting urban and rural required services; we also have considered a logical order in the aforementioned substructures.
Marketplaces and shopping malls along cultural centers such as mosques and religious site were established in order to provide the benefit of markets and commercial centers, current costs of the mosque and Hosseiniyeh. The institution of waqf had not sufficed only to provide urban infrastructures and its services in the past, but providing house for vulnerable population has been considered by founders of cash awqaf. Many founders of cash awqaf have begun to waqf house or land for people with low-income. Waqf of house and land was easy in the past due to low land price and land for those who had average purchasing power.
Cities have not developed in its present form and there was enough land for founders of cash awqaf, but today we see that an average person in the society is not able to buy land and build house. On the other hand, many urban services such as Drinking water, education, health services, services of bridges and roads and other services are provided by the government. However governments do not have the ability to provide urban and rural housing and shortage of urban and rural housing even become an economic problem in some cases for the country while now the cost of housing in household expenditure has allocated the major share of costs to itself. In urban and rural housing finance is one of the main problems. Due to speculative bubbles in the housing sector, each household is not able to provide house relying on their purchasing power and a significant number of urban households, even until the end their life, remain renters and rent devotes a major share of families’ income to itself.
The bottleneck of urban and partly rural housing has changed into an economic social crisis and it overshadowed negatively warm family centers. But, waqf investing fund can provide a new way to finance housing regarding the limitation of waqf of house and land. All Muslims of Iran and in the world can keep any amount of their financial assets in this fund. The benefit should be spent on providing needy people’s house in the society as their goal. Founding waqf investing fund, with the intention of profit in housing finance, firstly will be followed by housing market boom, and secondly it would be a sustainable way to continue this good tradition in society.
But in Iran, according to Shi'a jurisprudence, establishing waqf fund is limited. It is necessary for clerics to take action in order to remove these limitations. Waqf fund is created for organizations like universities in the world, but if we want to establish waqf fund with the intention of financing housing, endowment organization should play a custodian role. Stock waqf and its upturn is an issue that requires related jurisprudential inference. Considering that waqf of house and land, with the intention of providing housing services to the poor, faces critical bottlenecks and most people cannot participate widely according to their financial capabilities, Ejtehad is necessary to remove jurisprudential restrictions of waqf funds with the intention of financing the housing needs.
