Legacy Giving

What will be your legacy and ongoing sadaqah once you have gone?

Your legacy can be left behind in more ways than just your children or your lifetime’s work. You can continue to grow a catalogue of good deeds beyond the grave by leaving a portion of your inheritance to benevolent projects.

We are reminded about death in the Holy Qur’an, and the importance of creating a Will. Writing a Will is an important religious duty, as it makes sure your wealth is distributed in accordance with our faith. It also gives you the chance to distribute up to a third of your inheritance in a way that you wish, including giving it towards something that grows to benefit others and yourself.

The Holy Qur’an [3:185] says ‘and verily you will be paid in full your reward on the Resurrection Day’. It is on this day that we believe our good rewards will be awarded to us.

Through leaving a portion of your inheritance, you will be supporting beneficial work and saving lives as well as obtaining consequential good deeds, so even after death, you’ll continue to receive the fruits of the seeds you’ve planted.

Writing a Will is quick, simple and inexpensive to do. We’ve made it even easier by creating a dedicated platform, shiawills.org, that will explain some of the rulings and provide a Will template for you to use.

The Will document also includes a section that allows you to state where you want the discretionary third of your estate to be distributed. This can be split further into gifts to members of your family, friends or charitable causes, like WF-AID.

WF-AID carries out humanitarian work across the world, including providing water to communities, supporting orphans, educating children, feeding programmes, economic upliftment and emergency response. Our sustainable projects mean that your donations will be helping families for many years to come. Leaving a gift in your Will to a charitable cause not only helps the beneficiaries, but can help fill your scales with religious rewards, inshallah.

Best of all, through our ZER0% Admin Policy, you can be assured that all your contribution will go to support the work of these projects.

The Giving Cycle

There are many stages during life where we give charity, from hardship to celebrations and religious duties to compassion, but in death we can also still give and complete the cycle of charity.

Through your Will, it’s straightforward to leave gifts of money or property (land or otherwise) to a charity, so you can benefit from the good deeds.

The Prophet Muhammad (s) said:

‘A Muslim must not sleep a night without his Will being beneath his head.’

(Bihar al-Anwar, v.100, p. 194)

So, it’s highly recommended that everyone has a Will and it may even become compulsory for some given the consequences of not possessing a Will at death. Without a Will, there could be excessive inheritance tax to pay or further inheritance complications, especially if where you reside has different laws on how your wealth should be divided.