Wasiyyah Wajibah

When a son or daughter predeceases their own parent, the grandchildren are normally blocked from inheriting if a surviving uncle exists. To address the resulting hardship, scholars including Ibn Hazm, Imam Ahmad, Al-Hasan al-Basri, al-Tabari, and Yusuf al-Qaradawi treated a wasiyyah to those grandchildren as obligatory (wajib).

Egypt (1946), Pakistan (Muslim Family Law Ordinance 1961, § 4), Morocco, UAE, Tunisia, Kuwait, Syria, and Algeria have codified the obligatory bequest, capping it at 1/3 of the estate. In the U.S., the obligatory bequest must be explicitly written into an Islamic will to take effect.

Wasiyyah wajibah - the 'obligatory bequest' - is a modern statutory doctrine that forces a bequest to orphaned grandchildren whom classical Faraid would exclude: when a child predeceases their parent, that child's own children are blocked (hajb) from their grandparent's estate by surviving uncles, since closer agnates exclude more distant ones. Twentieth-century reformers, beginning with Egypt's Law of Testamentary Dispositions (1946), addressed the resulting hardship by legislating that the estate must carry a bequest to those grandchildren equal to what their deceased parent would have inherited, capped at the one-third bequest limit - grounding it in the Qur'anic command of provision for relatives (2:180) and the view of some early jurists that a bequest to non-inheriting kin was mandatory, not optional.

Versions now operate in Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, Tunisia, Morocco, Pakistan (which reached a similar result by granting representation), and others, with varying scope. For American Muslims the doctrine is purely elective - no U.S. state imposes it - which cuts both ways: a family following classical Faraid strictly may leave orphaned grandchildren nothing through the fixed shares, but the one-third wasiyyah is available precisely for cases like this, and using it for blocked grandchildren is arguably its highest classical purpose.

Practical drafting: decide explicitly whether your Islamic will adopts a wasiyyah wajibah provision (specify the formula - the predeceased child's notional share, capped at one-third), and coordinate it with life insurance or trust provisions for those grandchildren, which accomplish the same protection outside the estate entirely.