The OIC Fiqh Academy's ruling on eminent domain
The OIC Fiqh Academy's ruling on eminent domain — when the STATE may take your property, and the four conditions that make the taking just rather than 'an act of injustice and seizure'. Resolution No. 29 (4/4) starts from near-absolute private ownership ('Private property must be protected from any aggression... The owner is the absolute master of his property'), then permits expropriation ONLY where: (a) compensation is immediate and fair, set by qualified experts, and 'not less than the market value of a similar property'; (b) it is done by the public authority or its representative; (c) it is for genuine public need 'such as building mosques, roads or bridges'; and (d) — the gem — the property 'shall not be exploited for private or public investment projects', and the taking is not made 'prior to its justifiable time'. Break any one and it is 'an act of injustice and seizure prohibited by Allah the Almighty and His Prophet'. And if the public purpose later lapses, 'the original owner of the property or his heirs have a pre-emption right to repurchase it for a fair compensation'. International Islamic Fiqh Academy (OIC), Resolution No. 29 (4/4), adopted at the 4th session (Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 18-23 Jumada al-Akhira 1408H / 6-11 February 1988).
What this source says
WHO IS ALLOWED TO TAKE YOUR HOME OFF YOU. Almost everything else in this corpus answers a private question: may I sign this contract, may I take this premium, may I pay this fee. Resolution No. 29 (4/4) answers a public one — when, if ever, may the STATE take your property away from you? Every country has the power under some name: eminent domain, compulsory acquisition, compulsory purchase, expropriation. The Academy's answer is that the power is real but heavily fenced, and the fence is what makes this resolution worth reading on a site about owning a home without riba.
WHY A HALAL-FINANCE READER SHOULD CARE. This corpus spends most of its length arguing that ownership should be REAL — that the difference between a riba-based mortgage and a musharakah or an ijarah is whether somebody genuinely owns the asset and genuinely carries its risk. Resolution No. 29 is the primary-source statement of what that ownership is worth once you have it. The Academy does not treat title as a bookkeeping label that the state may erase for a good reason. It treats it as a protected right that even the public authority may override only under four conditions and only against immediate payment at market value. That is the property-rights floor beneath every ownership-based structure the site audits. (The link between Res 29 and the site's mortgage-alternative material is the SITE's framing, not the resolution's — Res 29 says nothing about mortgages, banks or home finance.)
THE STARTING POINT: PROPERTY IS NEARLY ABSOLUTE. The preamble does not begin from the state's needs. It begins from the owner's rights, invoking "the well established Shariah principle about the sanctity of individual property, which has become a necessary legal foundation of the religion" (IRTI: "an unequivocal rule of the religion"), and noting that "preservation of property is one of the five purposes of Shariah which it endeavors to preserve" (IRTI: "one of the five components of Shari'a which it endeavors to protect"). Note what the resolution does NOT do: it says property is one of the five and leaves it there. It does not enumerate the other four, and neither does this entry.
Point First is then about as strong a statement of private property as a legal text produces:
"Private property must be protected from any aggression. It is not permissible to narrow the scope of protection or to limit it. The owner is the absolute master of his property. He has full right to exploit it as he wishes, by legitimate means and benefit from all its lawful fruits."
Two qualifiers do real work there and should not be read past. "By legitimate means" is the whole of the rest of this corpus — you own your property absolutely, but that does not license you to earn riba with it. And "all its lawful fruits" is the same idea on the income side: the yield is yours, provided the yield is lawful.
THE COUNTERWEIGHT, AND ITS HONEST BASIS. The preamble then recalls "the conclusive proofs provided by the Sunnah, the practices of the Companions" and later generations "concerning the expropriation of real estate for the sake of public interest", applying general principles "which require safeguarding public welfare, regarding general needs as a necessity and sustaining personal damage to avoid public damage" (IRTI: "sustaining private harm to avoid public harm"). That last clause is the classical maxim doing the lifting: a private loss is borne to prevent a public one. It is the ONLY reason the resolution gives for allowing expropriation at all — not the state's convenience, and not the value the land could generate in better hands.
THE FOUR CONDITIONS. Point Second is the operative test. In the official edition it reads: "No property should be confiscated for the public interest, except with due respect to the following Shariah conditions" (IRTI: "No property should be expropriated for public interest, except with due regard to the following Shari'a conditions"):
(a) "Expropriation of real estate is done by providing immediate and fair compensation, determined by qualified experts, and such compensation is not less than the market value of a similar property." (IRTI: "making immediate and just compensation".)
(b) "The expropriation should be carried out by the public authority or its representative in this field."
(c) "Expropriation is made for public interest, in response to public need, such as building mosques, roads or bridges." (IRTI adds "for example".)
(d) "The expropriated real estate shall not be exploited for private or public investment projects and expropriation should not be carried out prior to its justifiable time."
Condition (a) is more demanding than it first looks, on three separate axes. IMMEDIATE — not promised, not staged, not owed. Compensation deferred is a debt, and the reader who has followed this corpus through Res 42 and Res 115 knows what happens to the real value of a debt over time. FAIR, AND DETERMINED BY QUALIFIED EXPERTS — the taking authority does not get to price its own taking. AND NOT LESS THAN THE MARKET VALUE OF A SIMILAR PROPERTY — a floor, not a target, and an objective one: what a comparable property is actually worth, not what the acquirer's valuer says yours is worth.
THE GEM: (d) BLOCKS TAKING FROM ONE OWNER TO ENRICH ANOTHER. Condition (d) is the sharpest line in the resolution and the one with the most contemporary bite. Property may be taken for "mosques, roads or bridges" — genuine public use. It may NOT be taken to be "exploited for private or public investment projects". A state may not, on this ruling, compulsorily acquire a neighbourhood because a development would be worth more than the houses, and the resolution closes the obvious loophole by barring PUBLIC investment projects in the same breath as private ones — the acquirer cannot launder the taking through a state-owned developer. The test is whether the public USES the thing, not whether the public PROFITS from it.
The rest of (d) — "expropriation should not be carried out prior to its justifiable time" — bars the pre-emptive land bank: taking now because the road might be built one day.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE CONDITIONS ARE BROKEN. The resolution does not treat a defective taking as merely unlawful or voidable. It uses the language of sin: "If all or some of these conditions are violated, the expropriation of real estate will be regarded as an act of injustice and seizure prohibited by Allāh the Almighty and His Prophet". Note "all or some" — the conditions are cumulative, and failing one is enough. There is no balancing test in which a strong public need excuses underpayment.
THE SECOND GEM: THE BUY-BACK RIGHT. The closing rule is the one most people do not know they have an argument for:
"If the property subject to expropriation for public interest is no more needed for that purpose, the original owner of the property or his heirs have a pre-emption right to repurchase it for a fair compensation."
The public purpose is not a one-time password that transfers the land forever. If the road is never built, or is built elsewhere, or the purpose lapses years later, the original owner — or, expressly, their HEIRS — has first claim to buy it back at fair value. This is what makes condition (c) enforceable rather than decorative: a purpose that evaporates does not leave the acquirer holding a windfall. It also quietly pairs with the corpus's inheritance material — the right survives the owner and passes down, which is only coherent if the takings rule is protecting a property right and not merely compensating a person for an inconvenience.
WHAT THIS RESOLUTION IS NOT. Res 29 is a ruling about the state and real estate. It is not a general theory of property, not a ruling on tax, not a ruling on nationalisation of businesses, and it grades no product. It cites no Qur'an verse (it says only that property's preservation "has several references in the Quran and the Sunnah", without giving one), no hadith number, no madhab tally and no vote count, and it names no country, no figure and no rate. Readers whose homes are actually subject to a compulsory-acquisition process should note that this is a Shariah ruling on what a just taking looks like — it is not, and does not claim to be, an account of any particular country's acquisition statute or of what compensation that statute affords.
THE THROUGH-LINE. Set beside Res 66 (bay al-wafa) and Res 44 (rent-to-own), a pattern in the Academy's property reasoning becomes visible: it keeps asking who REALLY owns the thing and who really carries it, and it refuses to let a form of words move ownership without moving the substance. Res 29 applies the same instinct upward, to the state: the public interest is a real reason to move property, but only at real value, only for real public use, only at the real time, and only for as long as the reason really holds.
Wording inside quotation marks is quoted from the source. The rest is this notebook’s summary of it — read the original before relying on it.
Provenance
- Compiled from
- Compiled from TWO genuinely different English translations of the SAME primary resolution, cross-read 2026-07-17, every load-bearing quote machine-verified verbatim against both source PDFs (line-wrap, hyphenation, inserted-page-number and diacritic aware, whitespace-normalised): [1] the INTERNATIONAL ISLAMIC FIQH ACADEMY (OIC) OFFICIAL ENGLISH EDITION, 'Resolutions and Recommendations of the International Islamic Fiqh Academy' (official edition, October 2021), printing it as 'Resolution No. 29 (4/4) / Eminent Domain for the Public Interest'; and [2] the IRTI/IDB PRINTED EDITION, 'Resolutions and Recommendations of the Council of the Islamic Fiqh Academy 1985-2000' (Islamic Research and Training Institute, Islamic Development Bank, Jeddah), printing it as 'RESOLUTION N 29 (4/4) / CONCERNING / EMINENT DOMAIN / (TAKING OVER PRIVATE PROPERTY FOR PUBLIC USE)'. Both editions carry the same 4th session (Jeddah, KSA, 6-11 February 1988 - the SAME session that adopted Res 27, Res 28, Res 30 and Res 31, all already in this corpus) and the same two operative points with the identical four conditions. This is a SETTLED operative ruling ('Resolves'), not a deferral - verified on disk before writing. The load-bearing content is: the preamble's grounding of the ruling in 'the sanctity of individual property' and in property as 'one of the five purposes of Shariah', with expropriation licensed only by the principles 'safeguarding public welfare, regarding general needs as a necessity and sustaining personal damage to avoid public damage'; point First (private property protected from any aggression, protection may not be narrowed or limited, owner is absolute master, may exploit it as he wishes 'by legitimate means' and take 'all its lawful fruits'); point Second (no taking for public interest except on four cumulative conditions: immediate + fair compensation set by qualified experts and not less than the market value of a similar property; carried out by the public authority or its representative; for public interest in response to public need such as mosques, roads or bridges; not exploited for private or public investment projects and not carried out prior to its justifiable time); the sanction ('If all or some of these conditions are violated... an act of injustice and seizure prohibited by Allah the Almighty and His Prophet'); and the reversion rule (if the property 'is no more needed for that purpose, the original owner of the property or his heirs have a pre-emption right to repurchase it for a fair compensation'). The resolution cites no specific Qur'an verse, no hadith number, records no madhab tally and no vote count, sets no figure or rate, names no country, and grades no product.
- Source
- PRIMARY TEXT (full title; session/city/date; the preamble and both operative points in full, with all four conditions, the violation sanction and the repurchase right), cross-read verbatim from two genuinely different English editions and machine-verified against both source PDFs. GENUINE DIVERGENCES BETWEEN THE EDITIONS, REPORTED NOT SMOOTHED: title - official 'Eminent Domain for the Public Interest' vs IRTI 'EMINENT DOMAIN / (TAKING OVER PRIVATE PROPERTY FOR PUBLIC USE)', with the IRTI body glossing it '"Eminent domain" (Power to take over private property for public use)'; academy name - 'International Islamic Fiqh Academy of the Organization of the Islamic Conference' vs 'Islamic Fiqh Academy'; preamble - 'a necessary legal foundation of the religion' vs 'an unequivocal rule of the religion'; 'preservation of property is one of the five purposes of Shariah which it endeavors to preserve' vs 'protection of property is one of the five components of Shari'a which it endeavors to protect'; 'it has several references in the Quran and the Sunnah' vs 'many Shari'a texts from the Holy Book and the Sunnah of the Prophet (PBUH) have the same purpose'; 'the practices of the Companions' vs 'the action of the Companions'; 'sustaining personal damage to avoid public damage' vs 'sustaining private harm to avoid public harm'; point First - 'It is not permissible' vs 'It is not permitted', 'The owner is the absolute master' vs 'The owner is absolute master'; point Second - the official's noticeably stronger verb 'No property should be CONFISCATED for the public interest' vs IRTI 'No property should be EXPROPRIATED for public interest' (a genuine framing difference on the same rule), and 'with due respect to' vs 'with due regard to'; condition (a) - 'providing immediate and fair compensation' vs 'making immediate and just compensation'; condition (b) - official 'should be carried out by the public authority or ITS representative' vs IRTI 'is carried out by public authority or by HIS representative' (IRTI's pronoun disagrees with its own antecedent - reproduced as found, not corrected); condition (c) - IRTI closes with 'for example', which the official drops; condition (d) - official 'and expropriation should not be carried out' vs IRTI 'and that the expropriation should not be carried out'; reversion - 'is no more needed for that purpose' vs 'is no more required for that purpose', and 'have a pre-emption right to repurchase it for a fair compensation' vs 'have a preemptive right to repurchase it at a just compensation'; closing invocation - 'Indeed, Allah is All-Knowing.' vs 'Verily, Allah is All-Knowing'; and Shariah/Shari'a spelling throughout. NO Hijri conflict: official 'Jumada al-Akhira' and IRTI 'Jumada Thani' are two names for the SAME month (Jumada II), and both editions give the identical Gregorian 6-11 February 1988. DISCLOSED SOURCE ARTIFACT (not a date conflict): in the IRTI edition Res 29's session line renders '(February, 6 to II, 1988)' - a Roman-numeral-looking 'II' where the day 11 belongs. This is ISOLATED to Res 29: the other eleven 4th-session resolutions in the same edition all render '11', and the official edition reads 6-11 February 1988, so the date itself is not in doubt - only this one line's rendering, reported AS FOUND rather than silently corrected. Flagged as a scanned-source artifact: the pdftotext and _djvu OCR extracts of the IRTI PDF share ONE text layer (both show 'II'), so they are NOT independent confirmation of whether the defect is in the print or in the OCR. DROPPED PER NO-FAB: Res 29 cites no specific Qur'an verse (it states only that property's preservation 'has several references in the Quran and the Sunnah' without giving one - NONE SUPPLIED HERE), no hadith number, no madhab tally, no vote count, no figure, no rate, and no country; the other four 'purposes of Shariah' are NOT enumerated by the resolution and are NOT supplied here; NO product is graded. LABELLED AS THE SITE'S OWN FRAMING, not the Academy's: the connection drawn between Res 29 and this site's ownership-based home-finance material (Res 29 says nothing about mortgages, banks or home finance), the deferred-compensation point read across to Res 42/Res 115, and the Res 66 / Res 44 through-line.
- School / basis
- Comparative / property-law with a PRIMARY OIC collective-ijtihad text. Resolution No. 29 (4/4), 4th session (Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 18-23 Jumada al-Akhira 1408H / 6-11 February 1988), is the Academy's SETTLED ruling on eminent domain (expropriation / compulsory acquisition of real estate for public use). Two operative points. FIRST establishes the baseline: 'Private property must be protected from any aggression. It is not permissible to narrow the scope of protection or to limit it. The owner is the absolute master of his property. He has full right to exploit it as he wishes, by legitimate means and benefit from all its lawful fruits' - note the two qualifiers, 'by legitimate means' and 'lawful fruits', which subordinate even absolute ownership to the rest of Shariah (you own it absolutely; you still may not earn riba with it). SECOND permits expropriation only on four CUMULATIVE conditions - (a) immediate and fair compensation determined by qualified experts and 'not less than the market value of a similar property'; (b) carried out by the public authority or its representative; (c) 'for public interest, in response to public need, such as building mosques, roads or bridges'; (d) the property 'shall not be exploited for private or public investment projects' and the taking must not be 'carried out prior to its justifiable time' - with the sanction that if 'all or some of these conditions are violated' the taking 'will be regarded as an act of injustice and seizure prohibited by Allah the Almighty and His Prophet', and the reversion rule that where the purpose lapses 'the original owner of the property or his heirs have a pre-emption right to repurchase it for a fair compensation'. The resolution's own stated basis is the sanctity of individual property + property as 'one of the five purposes of Shariah' (the other four NOT enumerated by the resolution and NOT supplied here), qualified by the general principles 'safeguarding public welfare, regarding general needs as a necessity and sustaining personal damage to avoid public damage'. GLOBAL-FIRST: a universal property-rights principle; no market-specific content, and the entry expressly does NOT describe any country's acquisition statute.
- Captured
- 2026-07-17
- Added
- 2026-07-17
- Trust
- Primary or near-primary source with a stable public URL.
Compiler’s note
The corpus's PROPERTY-RIGHTS anchor and its first ruling on the STATE's power over private property (grep-confirmed uncovered before writing: no existing entry cited Res 29 or eminent domain/expropriation). Chosen as the next SETTLED muamalat ruling <=12th session present in BOTH editions and not yet covered, per the candidate criteria recorded on the Res 27 entry. Why it earns a place on a halal-home-ownership site: the corpus's central argument is that ownership under a musharakah or ijarah is REAL in a way a riba mortgage's is not - Res 29 is the primary-source statement of what that real ownership is worth once held, i.e. a right the public authority itself may override only on four cumulative conditions and only at immediate market value. TWO GEMS. (1) Condition (d) blocks taking-from-one-owner-to-enrich-another: property may go for 'mosques, roads or bridges' but 'shall not be exploited for private or public investment projects' - and by barring PUBLIC investment projects in the same breath as private ones the resolution closes the state-owned-developer loophole; the test is whether the public USES the thing, not whether the public PROFITS from it. (2) The reversion right: where the public purpose lapses, 'the original owner of the property or his heirs have a pre-emption right to repurchase it for a fair compensation' - expressly surviving to the heirs, which is what makes condition (c) enforceable rather than decorative. Also load-bearing: the conditions are CUMULATIVE ('If all or some of these conditions are violated'), with no balancing test by which a strong public need excuses underpayment, and the sanction is moral not merely technical ('an act of injustice and seizure prohibited by Allah the Almighty and His Prophet'). Pairs with the corpus's other Academy property rulings - Res 66 (bay al-wafa), Res 44 (rent-to-own), Res 31 (key money, SAME session) - and, on the deferred-compensation point, with Res 42/Res 115 on the changing value of currency. HONEST SCOPE, stated in the article itself: Res 29 rules on the state and real estate only; it is not a general theory of property, not a ruling on tax or on nationalisation of businesses, and it is expressly NOT an account of any country's compulsory-acquisition statute or of what compensation that statute affords. NEXT CANDIDATE for a future run: another SETTLED muamalat/zakah ruling <=12th session present in BOTH editions and not yet covered (VERIFY 'Resolves' on disk first; AVOID the known DEFERRALS Res 8 (8/2), 14 (2/3), 20 (8/3), 22, 32, 33, 45, 77, 78, 87, 88 (5/9), 96, 105 (8/11), 111, 112 (6/12); Res 89 (6/9) near-dup of Res 42; Res 74 (5/8) almost entirely cross-references; and the already-covered set 1,2,9,10,12,13,15,21,28,29,30,31,40,42,43,44,46,47,50,51,52,53,59,60,63,64,65,66,70,72,73,75,76,84,85,86,91,92,101,102,103,104,107,108,109,110,115,179,222). Res 48 (10/5) 'Enforcement of Shariah Rules' and Res 113 (7/12) 'Rights of Children and Elders' are unchecked possibilities.
Topics
islamic-financefiqh-of-transactionsmuamalatpropertyproperty-rightsprivate-propertyownershipreal-estatelandeminent-domainexpropriationcompulsory-acquisitioncompulsory-purchasetakingspublic-interestmaslahahpublic-needcompensationmarket-valuefair-compensationjust-compensationimmediate-compensationvaluationqualified-expertspublic-authoritystate-powerinjusticezulmseizureusurpationghasbinvestment-projectsredevelopmentland-bankingbuy-backrepurchasepre-emptionshufahreversionheirsinheritancemaqasidfive-purposessanctity-of-propertyhousinghomehomeowneroiciifaislamic-fiqh-academyresolution-294th-sessionjeddah1988primary-sourcecollective-ijtihadfatwacross-readtwo-editionsverified
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