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226chapter fiveBequest and Inheritance LawsThe traditional law of succession has its roots in the cultural andpolitical milieu of the first two to three centuries of Islamic history.It has been characterised by a dominance of male centred perspectiveswhich created a patriarchal inheritance law and which fuelledthe spirit of tribalism and clan-ideology that controlled the waywealth was distributed among the different sections of Arab-Muslimsociety. Laws of inheritance were formulated by deliberately conflatingthe strict demarcation between family and state, leading to asituation where political succession (of dynastic rule) was secured byformulating inheritance laws that maintained the political interestsof the ruling families (as was the case with the Umayyads, Abbasids,Shi#ites, Zubayrites, and others respectively).Intellectually, inheritance laws were issued purely on the basis ofthe four arithmetic operations which, given the complexity of thematter, were highly insufficient and produced very crude and oversimplifiedsolutions. All this happened before Descartes (1596–1650)laid down the foundations of analytical geometry and introduced apioneering synthesis between ‘erupted digital quantities’ and ‘nondigitalquantities’. This means that Islamic inheritance law becameunfortunately finalised before the introduction of analytical geometryand the concept of mathematical ‘derivatives’, which was brought toperfection by the genius of Isaac Newton (1642–1726). Today, wecan use the insights gained from further developments in the geometricalsciences, benefit from Newton’s and Descartes’ theories, andreorganize the distribution of wealth by inheritance laws. We shouldnot repeat the unbelievable mistakes of earlier fiqh and formulate alaw of succession purely on the basis of a single ÈadÊth or, as has beenoften the case, overrule the injunctions of the Book by an unconvincingreference to several weak and unauthentic ÈadÊths.In doing this, we have to tackle the tendency in current jurisprudenceto ignore the priority of bequest stipulations over inheritancerules, as explicitly stated by the Book. 11 We need to combat the11MS adds in a footnote: ‘Testimony has been prescribed in several verses of theBook, and in verse 180 of Sårat al-Baqara it is enforced in a similar authoritativemanner as the command to pray and to fast. “It is prescribed, when death approachesany of you, if he leave any goods that he make a bequest to parents and next of kin,according to reasonable usage—this is due from the God-fearing.” In contrast, versesof inheritance are only three, as in Sårat al-Nis§" 11–13. Moreover, in four different