The waqf was an inalienable endowment under Islamic law by which a founder permanently dedicated land, buildings or revenue-producing property to a charitable or religious purpose, with the asset removed from sale, inheritance and division forever. The full-fledged legal form crystallised in the ninth century CE, and the oldest surviving waqfiya deed dates from 876 CE. Waqf deeds financed and maintained mosques, madrasas, hospitals (bimaristan), caravanserais, public fountains and cisterns, bathhouses, soup kitchens and covered markets, with the rents of shops and khans dedicated to the upkeep of the religious core. In the Ottoman period the institution was bureaucratised through standardised vakfiye documents, cash waqfs and a dedicated ministry, with over 26,000 waqfs recorded across the empire.
Waqf was the principal financing and land-tenure instrument of the pre-modern Islamic city, producing the mosque-madrasa-market complex (kulliye) that structured urban centres from Fez to Delhi. Because endowed property could not be alienated, waqf froze plot boundaries and street patterns for centuries, which explains both the durability of historic Islamic urban fabric and the difficulty modern planners faced in redeveloping it.
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