The inheritance shares

The half-share is real in the case usually cited, and it is not the rule the claim describes. Faraid is a system of more than thirty configurations, and the ratio the polemic generalises applies to one of them.

What the system actually does

Where a deceased leaves sons and daughters, the son takes twice the daughter’s portion (4:11). In other configurations the shares run differently: a mother and father may take equal sixths where there are children; a uterine brother and sister share equally; a sole daughter takes half the estate, more than several categories of male relative receive. A woman inherits as daughter, as wife, as mother, and as sister, and in a number of these she takes the same as her male counterpart or more. Describing the whole scheme by its most quoted line is like describing a tax code by one bracket.

The half that is never mentioned

The share does not arrive alone. Under the same law that gives the brother twice the portion, he carries an unconditional obligation of nafaqah: maintenance of his wife, his children, and where required his mother and unmarried sisters. His portion is encumbered before he receives it. Hers is not. A woman’s property, whether inherited, earned, or received as mahr, is hers absolutely, and her husband has no claim on it and no power to direct it, at a time when married women in England could not own property at all.

So the comparison the claim makes is between a gross figure and a net one. Set the obligations beside the shares and the arithmetic stops being what the objection needs it to be.

What is conceded

That the maintenance assumption is doing heavy lifting, and that where a brother takes the larger share and then supports nobody, the woman has been shortchanged by a man exploiting a system whose premise he has declined to honour. Contemporary Muslim jurists discuss precisely this, and the discussion is live and unfinished.

The verdict

The rule is a package: differential shares against differential burdens. The critic who presents one half of that package and suppresses the other has produced a striking statistic and an incomplete account, and the incompleteness is where the entire force of the claim comes from.