ADDRESS
BY
HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS
SULTAN NAZRIN MUIZZUDDIN SHAH
AT THE
INTERNATIONAL DA‘WAH CONVENTION 2026
DATE: MONDAY, 27 JULY 2026
TIME: 10.00 AM
VENUE: KUALA LUMPUR CONVENTION CENTRE
KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA
“Reimagining Waqf:
Barakah, Governance and Sustainable Ummah Development”
1. It is my pleasure to open this International Da’wah Convention, centred around a theme we can no longer afford to neglect: the reimagining of waqf for the barakah, the governance, and the sustainable development of our ummah. These are not three separate concerns; they are bound inextricably to one another. There can be no lasting barakah in an endowment that is carelessly governed, and no sustainable development for a community that has forgotten how to give.
2. I have long been struck by how much wisdom lies in the remarkable institution of waqf and by how much the wider world might learn from it. Here is an idea of quite astonishing elegance. A person sets aside something of value – a piece of land, a building, a sum of money – not to be consumed, but to be preserved, so that its benefit might flow to others in perpetuity. The asset itself is held intact. Only its fruits are given away. And those fruits go on nourishing the community long after the original benefactor has passed from this world.
3. An example of the sheer brilliance of waqf as an idea can be found in my own alma mater, Oxford University — a connection I was delighted to discover. Merton College — one of Oxford’s oldest colleges — was founded in 1264 by England’s then Lord Chancellor, Walter de Merton (d. 1277). In founding the college, de Merton established the first permanent land and estate endowments in England that would fund a self-governing academic community. If this sounds a lot like waqf, it is very likely no coincidence! De Merton was Chancellor during the Ninth Crusade, and indeed served under King Edward I (d. 1307), who led English forces to the Holy Land during these wars. It is not hard to imagine how the idea might have reached him directly from Islamic law.[1] And so, drawing upon the powerful concept of waqf, de Merton founded an institution that continues to flourish after three quarters of a millennium!
4. Indeed, what moves me most about waqf is that it takes the very long view. We live, I fear, in an age that thinks in remarkably short spans of time, from one quarter or one election to the next. The founders of these endowments, by contrast, thought in centuries. They planted, quite deliberately, trees under whose shade they knew they would never sit. I believe that this is the quality of mind our own age most urgently needs to recover, particularly when we consider the state of the natural world we shall hand down to our grandchildren. For there is a profound kinship between the spirit of waqf and the principle of stewardship that lies at the heart of so many of our traditions.
5. The Prophet sallallahu alayhi wassalam taught us that when a person dies, all of their deeds come to an end save for three; among them is sadaqah jariyah, a charity that continues to flow.[2] Waqf is sadaqah jariyah given institutional form. It is, in the truest sense, an investment whose dividends are paid in the Hereafter. When the Caliph Umar (d. 644), radiyallahu ‘anhu, acquired land at Khaybar and asked the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wassalam what he should do with the most precious property he owned, he was counselled to hold the land itself and give away its fruits.[3] Umar did exactly that; and his single act of restraint became a model for a thousand years of Muslim giving.
6. It is this single ruling that jurists across the centuries have pointed to as the origin of waqf as a distinct legal institution. And it is worth pausing on why Umar chose this piece of land, in particular, to endow in perpetuity. Allah subhanahu wa ta‘ala tells us in the Qur’an: “None of you will attain true piety unless you give of that which you love.”[4] Umar’s calculation was not about wealth he could spare. It was about wealth he could hardly bear to part with – his most treasured, precious and bounteous land. He gave it anyway; or rather, he gave it precisely because it was so precious to him, because he understood what was being asked of him. In doing so, Umar began our now centuries-old tradition of giving, in which the significance of a gift is measured not by the wealth or status of the donor, but by their intentions and their generosity. It is this same generous spirit that unites all of our instruments of Islamic social finance, from sadaqah — spontaneous giving — to zakat — recurring and obligatory donation — to qard al-hasan — lending on trust, without interest. What waqf does is take this impulse of giving and enshrine it forever: a permanent act of generosity that survives long after its originator has passed on.
7. We would do well to remember what waqf once built. The great libraries of Baghdad and Cordoba, the hospitals of Damascus and Cairo, the ancient universities, well before Oxford, like Al-Azhar and the Qarawiyyin, the fountains that gave water freely to the thirsty, the schools that asked no fee of the poor, and the caravanserais or roadside inns that sheltered the traveler through the night. These were often not the gifts of kings or state treasuries, but the endowments of ordinary believers. A merchant, a widow, a scholar, would set aside a portion of what Allah subhanahu wa ta‘ala had entrusted to them, and dedicate it in perpetuity to the good of others.
8. In ninth-century Fez, a woman named Fatima al-Fihri (d. ca. 880) used the entirety of the inheritance she received from her father to endow a waqf that grew into the University of Qarawiyyin – recognized by UNESCO as the oldest continuously operating institution of higher education on Earth.[5] In the 1530s, the Ottoman Governor of Bosnia, Gazi Husrev Bey, founded a waqf that, within a single generation, built a mosque, two madrasahs, a library, a covered market, two hospitals, a public kitchen, sixty shops, and a water system that carried water seven kilometres into the city![6] Incapable of being sold, seized or absorbed into private property thanks to its founding deed, this waqf has survived communism, the Second World War, invasions, sieges and state takeovers: nearly 500 years of continuous sadaqah jariyah all from a single endowment.
9. These are but two of a multitude of examples across the centuries, demonstrating how waqf turns private wealth into a public good — one that does not expire, but continues to nurture individuals, communities, and entire civilizations across generations. We must never underestimate just how remarkable that is. Most wealth is spent and gone. Waqf is wealth that keeps working. It is the nearest thing our civilization has devised to a spring that does not run dry, watering one generation and then the next, and still the next after that.
10. The example from Bosnia teaches us about endurance; a further example from Indonesia will teach us about innovation. The reach of waqf extends further than we might typically imagine, not only into education and social welfare, but into the existential challenge of our age — that is, the climate crisis. We find waqf forests from Aceh to West Java, where endowed lands are protected in perpetuity from human exploitation.[7] The Green Waqf initiative in East Nusa Tenggara has successfully transitioned rural madrasahs and pesantrens to clean solar power, eliminating fossil fuel dependence.[8] This initiative deploys Islamic social finance to install off-grid renewable energy infrastructure in areas historically hindered by grid unreliability. The Indonesian government has set its sights on building one thousand eco-mosques,[9] much like the one King Charles recently visited in Cambridge,[10] while state-issued green sukuk has already funded some 2,900 infrastructure projects across 34 provinces.[11]
11. Nevertheless, financial tools and instruments alone cannot be our moral compass. Having the ability to establish a cash waqf sukuk is not enough; we must also think deeply about the purpose it is intended to serve. Here our own moral tradition offers something no financial engineering can supply on its own. In February 2024, an Islamic environmental charter called Al-Mizan: A Covenant for the Earth was launched at the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi to engage Muslims in combating climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. This is the Muslim world’s answer to Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ landmark encyclical on climate change. A shared vision of this kind, rooted in our moral and spiritual principles, is as vital to effective waqf as the capital that sustains it.
12. Yet we must be honest about the present, for honesty is itself a form of respect for this institution. Too much of our waqf today lies dormant. Its lands sit idle, its records are incomplete, its titles are disputed, and its potential goes unrealized. In some places, the endowments of the faithful have been lost through neglect or mismanagement that would shame those who first established them. Where an endowment is poorly governed, barakah is not multiplied but diminished, and the trust of the donor is quietly betrayed. It is not enough to romanticize waqf as a glory of our past while we permit it to decay in our present. For we are here today, in some sense, because of the benefits it has bestowed over the centuries; and we therefore have a duty to make it a working instrument of our future.
13. This is where governance enters, not as a bureaucratic burden but as an amanah, a duty given in trust. The one who administers an endowment is not its owner. He holds it in trust for the poor, the students, the sick, and the generations to come who do not yet have a voice at our tables. To keep clear records, to account honestly for every Ringgit, to invest wisely and guard against loss: these are not secular intrusions upon a sacred institution. They are the very substance of faithfulness to it. A well-kept ledger, in the service of a waqf, is an act of worship.
14. I would say to the administrators and trustees among us that the standards we demand of ourselves must be higher than those the world would demand of us, precisely because what we hold is a sacred trust and not merely a public one. The eye of the auditor may miss a fault in this world. The eye of Allah subhanahu wa ta‘ala does not.
15. This is where da’wah also enters. To revive waqf is to remind our communities, and especially our young, that Islam has never separated worship – our ‘ibadat – from the welfare of society, our mu‘amalat. The one who gives to a waqf is not merely parting with wealth. They are sustaining a civilization that measures success by what one leaves behind for others rather than by what one gathers for oneself. That is a lesson our age desperately needs, surrounded as we are by every invitation to accumulate and very few to endow.
16. There is a promise in this that the young, in particular, should hear. In Surah al-Baqarah, Allah subhanahu wa ta‘ala likens those who spend their wealth in His way to a single grain of corn that grows seven ears, each bearing a hundred grains, for Allah subhanahu wa ta‘ala multiplies the reward of whom He wills.[12] This is the barakah of waqf made plain. What is given is not lost but increased: in this world through the good it does, and in the next world through a reward that does not cease.
17. Let me then turn our minds to what lies ahead. The instruments available to us today would have astonished those who built the endowments of old. Cash waqf, for instance, allows the believer of modest means to give a little each month and see it pooled into something substantial. Waqf linked to Islamic finance can fund schools, clinics and affordable housing at a scale that earlier generations could hardly have imagined. Technology can bring transparency to records that were once vulnerable to loss and dispute. Far from being threats to our tradition, these are embodiments of its faithful continuation into a new century. This is how we reimagine waqf.
18. In fact, the work already being done globally to update waqf for the twenty-first century deserves far greater recognition. In 2018, Bank Indonesia developed a set of Waqf Core Principles in conjunction with our own INCEIF University; this initiative built on the 2016 Zakat Core Principles issued by Bank Indonesia alongside Indonesia’s national zakat board, BAZNAS, and the Islamic Development Bank. The Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) has a Shariah standard on waqf; Kazakhstan’s international finance centre has developed its own waqf governance framework; and a World Zakat and Waqf Forum has been established to foster international collaboration in this field. A framework for the management and governance of waqf, in other words, already exists – we do not need to start from scratch, but rather join the dots and open the doors for the genuinely inclusive development of international waqf guidance.
19. There are many innovative solutions available to us, and many paths forward. In Southeast Asia, Indonesia has pioneered micro-waqf, inspired by microfinance, enabling individuals to make small, regular, digital donations that are aggregated into large waqf funds. As I have already mentioned, the country has also launched several eco-waqf initiatives, including waqf to fund solar panels and waqf to protect land from exploitation. Here in Malaysia, INCEIF University has spent well over a decade developing an intellectual and financial framework for modern waqf, including championing international ventures. We have also seen the growth of corporate waqf, whereby companies allocate shares as endowments, with the dividends financing social projects – in this way, turning businesses into permanent social finance engines. And in today’s ever-more connected world, we can even think globally, creating platforms that allow Muslims from all over the planet to pool their donations into funds that are professionally managed, with the returns financing everything from climate projects to education. I spoke recently about the power of the global Muslim ummah to make a hugely positive impact on the world if we all act in unison;[13] this offers one very tangible mechanism to realize that impact.
20. These are the routes, options and ideas that must be explored at this convention and beyond: weighing the pros, and cons, assessing the practicalities of each reimagining of waqf, so that plans can be put into action. And, as we explore these reimaginings, I would urge all of us to remember that waqf was, in its inception, an innovative, forward-looking idea. Thus, the most fitting way for us to continue this noble, time-honoured tradition is to be innovative and forward-looking today.
21. My hope for this convention is therefore a practical one. That we leave not only inspired but resolved. Resolved to modernize the stewardship of our endowments, to bring professional competence and integrity to their management, to harness new instruments in their service, and to restore waqf to its rightful place at the heart of a self-reliant and dignified ummah. To that end, allow me to offer four suggestions, in the hope that we leave this hall not merely instructed, but driven and enabled to act.
22. First, let us commission an international, open, consultative working group, tasked with taking Indonesia’s existing Waqf Core Principles, AAOIFI’s waqf standards, Kazakhstan’s governance framework, and other guidance I have not mentioned, and extending them into a common, voluntarily adoptable set of core principles that any waqf institution, in any jurisdiction, can use, without any state or nation ceding its constitutional authority. Given its role in developing the original Indonesian principles, I would ask INCEIF University to consider convening the secretariat for this effort.
23. Second, let us accelerate the shift towards digital cash-waqf platforms with radically transparent, real-time public dashboards, so that a donor in this hall can trace their Ringgit, Rupiah, or Riyal from pledge to project to published outcome.
24. Third, let us launch a pilot: a Waqf for Peace and Planetary Resilience, initially seeded across a small cluster of mosques, madrasahs, and community centres in Malaysia, Indonesia, and elsewhere in ASEAN. This pilot would fund solar retrofits and climate-resilient water infrastructure, modelled on Indonesia’s eco-pesantren experience. At the same time, it would embed a shared curriculum, drawing on Al-Mizan’s environmental ethics, so that the installation of these solar panels goes hand-in-hand with the training of young people, not only in sustainability, but in the trust-building work of living harmoniously with neighbours of every faith.
25. Fourth, let us ensure that the institutional charters of our waqf bodies formally enshrine the principles of balance, justice, mercy, and trusteeship that Al-Mizan and our peacebuilding scholars have articulated so clearly, not as decorative preambles, but as binding governance criteria against which trustees can be held to account.
26. The time for action is now. This conference is our golden opportunity: a catalyst for us to do the vital work that will propel the noble institution of waqf into the future, so that it may continue to benefit those who inherit our world. Let it not be said of our generation that we admired the achievements of our forefathers and added none of our own.
27. May Allah subhanahu wa ta‘ala accept the intentions voiced in this hall, bless the deliberations in the days ahead, grant wisdom to those who carry the trust of the ummah’s endowments, and make of our efforts a lasting sadaqah whose rewards continue to flow long after we are gone. Amin.
- For the Islamic origins in the West of trust law and charitable endowments from Islamic law, see George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981). ↑
- Related by Muslim. ↑
- Related by al-Bukhari. ↑
- Surah Al ‘Imran, 3:92. ↑
- Fatima al-Fihri founded the mosque and madrasa that became the University of Qarawiyyin in Fez in 859 CE, endowed as a waqf using her inheritance from her father; see Rebecca Mortimer, ‘Fatima al-Fihri: Founder of the World’s First University’, Manchester University Press Blog (8 March 2018), and Sikeena Karmali Ahmed, ‘Fatima Al-Fihri and Al-Qarawiyyin University,’ World History Encyclopedia (7 March 2025). ↑
- Sphahic Omer, ‘Gazi Husrev-beg’s Mosque in Sarajevo: A Gem of Islamic Architecture,’ Muslim Heritage (5 September 2024). On the scope of Gazi Husrev Bey’s endowments, signed in 1531 and 1537, see https://begovadzamija.ba . ↑
- Fajar Saris Hendarsah, ‘Wakaf Hutan: Planting Hope, Responding to the Climate Crisis,’ Enter Nusantara (5 June 2025). ↑
- Badan Wakaf Indonesia, Green Waqf Framework (Jakarta: BWI, 2022). ↑
- Thomson Reuters Foundation, ‘Indonesia Unveils Plan to Roll Out 1,000 Eco-Mosques by 2020,’ Eco-Business (17 November 2017). ↑
- BBC, ‘King Hails Design of Europe’s First Eco Mosque,’ BBC News (21 July 2026). ↑
- United Nations Development Programme, ‘Indonesia’s Green Bond and Sukuk Initiative,’ UNDP Research and Reports (16 October 2018). ↑
- Surah al-Baqarah, 2:261. ↑
- Sultan Nazrin Shah, ‘Everyone Matters: Pride and Unity in Islam,’ Royal Address at the 8th World Conference on Islamic Thought and Civilization (WCIT), Ipoh (21 July 2016). ↑