Page:The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 1.djvu/235

 tant.

I have ventured to trespass upon your courtesy, not because I want to defend myself, but because of the decision of the Supreme Court, which, I believe, with all due respect to Sir Walter Wragg, is based upon an erroneous view of the Mahommedan Law, and would vitally affect a large portion of the Indian Colonists.

Were I a Mahommedan, I should be very sorry to be judged by a Mahommedan whose sole qualification is that he is born a Mahommedan. It is a revelation that the Mahommedans know the law intuitively, and that a non-Mahommedan never dare give an opinion on a point of Mahommedan Law.

The decision (if your report is correct) that the brother will be entitled to his 5/24ths only after he “can show that he represents the poor”, is, I am afraid, according to the Mahommedan Law administered in India and revealed in the Koran, subversive of that law. I have carefully gone through the chapters on “Inheritance” in Macnaughten's Mahomedan Law (which, by the way, is edited by a non-Mahommedan Indian and which Messrs Binns & Mason, in their report published after their return from India, say is the book considered to be one of the best on that law), and have also gone through that portion of the Koran which relates to the subject, and in them I find not one word with regard to the poor being entitled to any part of the inheritance of a deceased Moslem. If the Koran and the book above mentioned are any authority on that law, then not only is there no portion to which the poor are entitled in the case in question, but under no circumstances are the poor entitled to any part of an intestate estate. I hope to be able to show that the brother (it should really be the half-brother), when he takes anything under that law, takes it in his own right, and takes it because he is a brother.

It is likely that His Lordship, when he was talking about an inheritance, was actually but unconsciously thinking of almsgiving, which is incumbent upon every Mahommedan. It is one of their articles of faith. But the principle that guides almsgiving during life does not obtain in cases of distribution of inheritance. A Mahommedan, by giving alms during his lifetime, earns for himself heaven or a respectable place therein. Alms given out of his estate by the State after his death can surely do him no spiritual good, because it is not his act. After a Moslem's death it is the relatives who have a prior, nay exclusive, claim upon his estate.

Says the Koran :
 * We have appointed unto everyone kindred to inherit part of what their parents and relations shall leave after their deaths.