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A Manual of Hadith: Chapter XXVI: Wills and Inheritance

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3:584: Abu Huraira: The Prophet said, I am closer to the believers than their selves in ... Similar meaning (65%) 3:495: Abu Huraira: Whenever a dead man in debt was brought to Allah's Apostle he would ... Similar meaning (65%) 4:37: Abu Huraira: Allah's Apostle said, My heirs will not inherit a Dinar or a Dirham ... Similar meaning (63%) The Minor Law Books (SBE33): Fragments of Brihaspati: XXV. The Law of Inheritance Similar meaning (63%)
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This is an excerpt from a classical Islamic legal text covering the laws of inheritance (*mīrāth*) and wills (*wasiyyah*), drawing on both Quranic verses and Prophetic traditions (*ahadith*). The text lays out the fixed fractional shares allocated to specific heirs — daughters, sons, parents, spouses, and siblings — as prescribed in Quran 4:11-12, establishing a detailed hierarchy for distributing a deceased person's estate. A central rule is that testamentary bequests are capped at one-third of the estate for charitable purposes, since Quranic law already determines heirs' portions, making wills in favor of legal heirs redundant or invalid. The text addresses edge cases systematically: precedence of debt repayment before any distribution, the bar on inheritance between Muslims and non-Muslims (contextualized as a wartime measure), the prophets' inability to leave personal inheritance, and the descent of unclaimed estates through increasingly remote kin, freed slaves, and ultimately the Muslim state. Notably, it includes early scholarly disagreements among the Prophet's companions — particularly on grandchildren's inheritance rights — signaling that some rules were contested even in the formative period. Written for a reader already familiar with Islamic religious vocabulary, it functions as a reference commentary synthesizing scripture, hadith, and juristic reasoning for practitioners of Islamic inheritance law.

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