Tamer Elgamil ·
Egyptian families assume a mother's gold goes to her daughters. Dar al-Ifta says it goes to every heir, and the valuation fight that follows is the harder one to settle.
A mother dies and leaves jewellery. The family says what families in Egypt often say: the gold is the daughters'. It is women's gold, after all.
Dar al-Ifta has been asked this so often that its fatwa secretary took it up again in July 2026, and the answer does not change. Everything the deceased leaves is an estate, and an estate is divided among all the heirs by the fixed shares. Gold is not carved out for the daughters.
Brothers can give their share to their sisters afterwards, and many do. But that is a gift, made freely, by someone who already owns the thing he is giving away. It is not the starting position.
Egyptian inheritance is codified, and the code applies the fara'id, the fixed Quranic shares, directly. A legal summary of the statute sets out the spouse's portion clearly.
A widow takes one eighth of the estate if her husband left children, and one quarter if he did not. Where there is more than one widow, they divide that portion between them. A widower takes one quarter if there are children and one half if there are none.
What is left goes to the children, with a son's share equal to two daughters'. These are the legal defaults, and they do not shift because the asset happens to be a bracelet rather than a plot of land.
Before any of that arithmetic runs, one thing has to be settled. Was the gold the dead person's property at all?
A wife's shabka is not. Dar al-Ifta's ruling on the point is blunt: gold handed to a wife during her husband's lifetime became hers on receipt, and his death confirms that ownership rather than creating it, leaving no claim for the other heirs. It never enters his estate.
There is a wrinkle worth knowing. The deferred part of a mahr, the portion agreed but not yet handed over, is treated as a debt the estate owes her. That makes her a creditor first and an heir second, and creditors are paid before shares are calculated.
Reverse the situation and the answer reverses with it. A woman who dies owning her jewellery outright leaves it in her own estate, to be divided among her own heirs. That is precisely the case Dar al-Ifta keeps being asked about.
Gold in an estate is generally valued on the day it is actually divided, not on the day of death. Where a settlement drags on for months or years, that choice moves real money between people.
Then comes the part that catches families out. There is not one price. There are two.
The number quoted publicly is a shop's selling price. It is not what a shop will pay to take the same piece back. A buy-back price is lower, and for jewellery it usually drops the workmanship charge that was paid when the piece was first made, because the shop did not do that work and will not pay for it.
Heirs who look up today's price and multiply by the weight are dividing a number nobody is going to hand them.
Two routes, and fiqh prescribes neither:
Both are practical answers to a problem the fixed shares do not address. The shares say what fraction each heir receives. They say nothing at all about what the jewellery is worth.
Most gold inheritance disputes in Egypt are not disputes about the shares. Those are stated with unusual precision and rarely surprise anyone. They are disputes caused by skipping a step.
Do those three in that order and the remaining conversation is arithmetic. Skip one and the family is arguing about something it never defined.
For a sense of what a piece holds as raw metal, the gram calculator, the sell-back price page and the price history supply the three numbers these conversations usually need.
No. Dar al-Ifta's fatwa secretary restated in July 2026 that everything the deceased leaves forms an estate, divided among all the legal heirs by their fixed shares. Brothers may hand their share to their sisters afterwards, but that is a voluntary gift rather than the default.
No. Dar al-Ifta holds that gold handed to her during his lifetime became her property on receipt, and his death confirms that ownership rather than creating it, leaving no claim for the other heirs. A deferred mahr not yet handed over is treated as a debt the estate owes her, paid before shares are worked out.
Generally at the date the heirs actually divide it. That matters most when a settlement takes months or years, because the value the heirs are splitting is the value on the day of division, not on the day of death.
The public number is a shop's selling price. A shop's buy-back price is lower, and for jewellery it usually excludes the workmanship charge paid when the piece was first made, because the shop did not do that work. Heirs who multiply today's quoted price by the weight are dividing a figure nobody will actually pay them.