Briefly, the inheritance law as laid down in the Holy Qur’ān is this. After the payment of debts and execution of the will, if any, the shares of the parents and husband or wife shall be first taken out; after that the rest of the property shall go to the children, the son having double the portion of the daughter; if there are no children and there are brothers and sisters, one-sixth if there is only one brother or sister, and one-third if there are more than one, shall go to them; if the deceased leaves neither children nor parents, the whole of the property, after the husband’s or the wife’s share has been taken out, shall go to brothers and sisters; if there is a single female, daughter or sister, she shall take one-half of the property, a single brother following the same rule, and if there are two or more daughters or sisters they shall take two-thirds, the residue going to the nearest male relative according to Ḥadīth; if a person entitled to inheritance is dead but leaves behind offspring, that offspring shall take his place, if the father or the mother is dead, the grandfather or grandmother shall take his or her place: all brothers and sisters, whether uterine or consanguine or full, shall be treated equally; if there are no brothers or sisters, the nearest relatives after them, such as father’s brothers or father’s sisters, shall take their place.

The inheritance law as explained above, on the basis of the Holy Qur’ān, is very simple, and not the least complication arises in its application. It is when the spirit underlying that law is neglected that complication arises. For instance, it is clear that when there are parents and a husband or wife along with the children, the parents and the husband or wife would get their shares first and the rest of the property would go to the children. In case there are two or more daughters only among the children, two-thirds of the residue ought to go to them, the remaining one-third going to the nearest male relative. But the jurists in this case adopt a peculiar course. They allot two-thirds of the whole to the daughters, one-third to the parents and one-fourth or one-eighth to the husband or the wife, as the case may be. This evidently leads to a complication, as the daughter gets two-thirds, parents one-third, husband or wife one-fourth or one-eighth, the total amount of shares being 5/4 or 9/8. This difficulty has been solved by dividing the property into fifteen parts in the first case and giving 8/15 to the daughters, 4/15 to the