Misha'al Al-Kadhi's Response to the Inheritance problem

And it just doesn't add up: Sura 4:11-12 and 4:176 state the Qur'anic inheritance law. If a man dies and leaves three daughters, his two parents and his wife then they will receive the respective shares of 2/3 for the 3 daughters together, 1/3 for the parents together [both according to verse 4:11] and 1/8 for the wife [4:12] which adds up to more than the estate available.

A second example is, that when a man leaves only his other, his wife and two sisters, then they receive 1/3 [mother, 4:11], 1/4 [wife, 4:12] and 2/3 [the two sisters, 4:176], which again adds up to 15/12 of the available property.

To the above Misha'al Al-Kadhi wrote an elaborate answer which essentially confirms (instead of rebuts) my claims:

The verses dealing with inheritance are not as our current author may imagine only these couple of verses. There are many other verses in different locations throughout the Qur'an dealing with this issue. They range over the chapters of Al-Baqarah(2), Al-Nissa(4), Al-Maidah(5), Al-Anfal(8), etc. This is to say nothing about the many multiples of that in the Sunnah (Sayings of the prophet, pbuh). Out of these many verses and sayings of the prophet has been developed the science of "Al-Fara'id" which is a very vast issue and which can not be collected in a single paragraph. Suffice it to say that the question appears to display a complete unawareness of any aspects of the discipline of Al-Fara'id, its basis, its subdivisions, its special cases, the rules of "Awl" and "Usbah," the laws of "Usool" of the Fara'id, the laws of "Hajb wa Hirman," and many other issues relating to this matter. This particular example falls under the laws of "Awl" which regulate the cases when the inheritor's shares exceed or "overshoot" the sum of the total inheritance, and in which case the inheritance is recalculated according to the laws of Awl and redistributed. In the above two cases, the distribution would be "Parents: 4/27 each, wife:1/9, daughters:16/27" and for the second case, "Mother:4/15, Wife:3/15, Sisters:8/15." The books of Fiq contain specific examples of Awl, such as the Awl of Umar ibn al-Khattab, however, the interested reader can study this issue further by referring to any number of references on Islamic Fiq.

There are yet other cases when the number of inheritors and their shares do not sum to a whole 100%, in which case the laws of "Usbah" come into play in order to distribute the unclaimed shares which have no corresponding people to receive them. Then there are the laws of "Hajb wa Hirman," which encompass still other special cases of inheritance and block normally deserving relatives from inheriting in special extraordinary cases."

Our current author objects to Islamic law and wishes it to conform to his tastes. ...

Thank you Mr. Al-Kadhi for confirming exactly what I claimed in my article. There are cases in which the shares assigned by the Qur'an overshoot the available estate, i.e. the shares sum to more than one (which you call "awl"), and cases where the shares assigned by the Qur'an do not exhaust the estate, i.e they sum to less than one (for which you provided the technical term "usbah"). I stated in my original article that I am of no doubt that the Muslims have found ways to deal with these contradictions in the Qur'an and as you state above, there are rules for recalculation of the shares.

I never questioned this. You very skillfully affirmed that those problem cases exist and that the Qur'an gives rules which are impossible to follow in real life. That is all I claimed and you gave a learned confirmation for this in your response. I never questioned that Muslims are able to deal with the practical issues of life. But this is one instance where the author of the Qur'an shows incompetence at a very basic level. And this is one of many observations which throw doubt on the claim that God is the author of the Qur'an.

This and only this was my claim.

That you may see I am not distorting Mr. Al-Kadhi's response and have not left out anything relevant to my original claim here is his full response to my claim.

Contradictions in the Qur'an
Answering Islam Home Page

Last edited: March 26, 1997