Two cousins sit in the same kitchen after the funeral, both with a phone in their hand, both looking at a faraid calculator, and the two screens do not agree. One says the daughters take everything. The other leaves a third to an uncle in Karachi nobody has spoken to since 2019.
Neither app is broken. The faraid differences between madhhabs are real, documented, and about twelve centuries old, and a calculator that does not tell you which school it is applying is hiding the most important assumption it makes.
Here is the part that gets lost in family arguments. The schools agree about most of it. The fixed fractions, the order an estate is paid out in, the two-to-one ratio between a son and a daughter, the principle that a nearer heir blocks a further one: all common ground between Hanafi, Shafi’i, Maliki and Hanbali jurists, and much of it shared with the Ja’fari (Twelver Shia) school too. In an ordinary estate with a spouse, some children and a surviving parent, all four Sunni schools hand you the same numbers to the penny.
The disagreements cluster in a small number of situations. What follows walks through them one at a time, shows the arithmetic where it changes, and does not tell you which position is right. That is not modesty. It is the correct handling of a question qualified scholars have argued in good faith for a very long time.
Before going further: this is educational writing, not a fatwa and not legal advice. Which position applies to your family is a question for a scholar of the school you follow, and whether it can be enforced is a question for a lawyer where the property sits.
The short answer
All four Sunni schools take the Quranic fixed shares (furud) from Surah An-Nisa 4:11, 4:12 and 4:176 in the same terms, use the same residuary (asaba) structure, and apply proportional reduction (awl) when the fractions overshoot. Four genuine differences matter in practice.
Where fixed shares leave a surplus and no residuary exists, Hanafi and Hanbali jurists return it to the sharers by proportional increase (radd), while classical Shafi’i and Maliki doctrine sent it to the public treasury. Relatives through a female link (dhawu al-arham) are admitted by Hanafi and Hanbali jurists and were classically excluded by the other two. A paternal grandfather alongside the deceased’s brothers is handled one way by Abu Hanifa and another by everyone else. And the Ja’fari school rejects the residuary structure entirely, sorting heirs into three classes, which changes outcomes for daughters, brothers and uncles dramatically.
What all four Sunni schools agree on
It is worth being specific about the agreement, because people who have only heard about the disputes assume the whole system is contested.
The order of payment is settled: funeral expenses, then debts (including any unpaid dower owed to a widow, which is a debt and not a share), then a bequest (wasiyyah) of up to one third of what remains, then the fixed shares, then the residue.
Fixed fractions are settled as well. Six appear in the Quranic verses and every school reads them the same way: one half, one quarter, one eighth, two thirds, one third, one sixth. A husband takes one half without descendants and one quarter with. A wife takes one quarter without and one eighth with, shared between co-wives. A mother takes one third, dropping to one sixth where there are children or two or more siblings. A father takes one sixth alongside a descendant and the residue otherwise. One daughter takes one half, two or more take two thirds between them.
The residuary structure is agreed in outline: sons, then sons’ sons, then the father, then the grandfather, then full brothers, consanguine brothers, their sons, then paternal uncles and their sons. Proportional reduction is agreed too, all four schools accepting that when the fractions add to more than one, every share shrinks proportionally, a solution reported from Umar’s caliphate and dissented from at the time by Ibn Abbas.
Bars on inheritance are broadly agreed too, with one wrinkle. A difference of religion prevents inheritance in both directions on the mainstream position of all four schools, and a person who unlawfully kills someone does not inherit from them. On what counts as killing here the schools separate: Shafi’i jurists bar any homicide including an accidental one, Maliki jurists generally bar only deliberate killing, and the Hanafi position sits between them.
Disagreement one: what happens to the leftover
Say the fixed shares do not use up the estate and there is nobody in the residuary line. A man dies leaving one daughter and nothing else: no son, no father, no brothers, no paternal uncles or their sons. The daughter’s fixed share is one half. Who gets the other half?
Hanafi and Hanbali jurists apply proportional increase (radd). The surplus goes back to the Quranic sharers in proportion to their existing shares, so the daughter’s half becomes the whole estate. The spouse is excluded from radd in the classical rule of both schools, on the reasoning that a marital claim is not a blood claim, though several modern codes now allow the surplus to return to a surviving spouse when there is literally nobody else at all.
Classical Shafi’i and Maliki doctrine took a different route. With no residuary heir, the surplus went to the public treasury (bayt al-mal) as the residuary of last resort for the community. That is a coherent position and was never meant as a slight to the daughter. It assumed a functioning treasury that would spend the money on the community she belonged to.
Later jurists in both schools accepted that where no properly administered treasury exists, the surplus should go to the sharers rather than disappear into a state budget with no religious character. Most modern codes in Muslim-majority countries apply radd whatever their historic school. I would treat “Malikis do not apply radd” as true of the classical texts and misleading about how a Maliki-majority country settles estates today.
The cluster piece on inheritance when there are only daughters works through the money on this one, because it is the case where the school you follow changes the outcome most often for ordinary families.
Disagreement two: relatives through a female link
Dhawu al-arham are the relatives who are neither fixed sharers nor residuaries because the connection to the deceased runs through a woman. A daughter’s son and daughter. A sister’s children. A maternal grandfather. Maternal uncles and aunts, and paternal aunts.
Hanafi and Hanbali jurists admit them, after the sharers, after the residuaries, and after radd. Classical Shafi’i and Maliki doctrine excluded them, with the estate going to the treasury instead, and later authorities in both schools softened that where the treasury argument does not hold.
The two schools that admit distant kindred do not order them identically. Hanafi jurists work through recognised classes in a fixed sequence. Hanbali jurists more commonly use tanzil, placing each distant relative in the position of the ancestor through whom they connect. On many family shapes the two methods agree. On some they do not, and this is a corner of the subject where a blog post is no substitute for a specialist.
Disagreement three: the grandfather and the brothers
This is the oldest live dispute in the field, and both sides trace to companions of the Prophet rather than to later theorising.
Abu Hanifa held that a paternal grandfather stands in the father’s place. Since a father excludes the deceased’s brothers completely, so does the grandfather. Clean, simple, and the position the Hanafi school generally teaches.
Malik, al-Shafi’i and Ahmad ibn Hanbal followed the position associated with Zayd ibn Thabit: the grandfather shares with full and consanguine brothers rather than excluding them. He takes whichever is most favourable to him of a brother’s portion (muqasama), one third of the residue, or one sixth of the whole estate, and he never drops below that sixth. Abu Hanifa’s own two leading students, Abu Omar and Muhammad al-Shaybani, sided with the majority against their teacher, which tells you something about how finely balanced the arguments were.
Uterine brothers and sisters are excluded by the grandfather in all four schools, so the dispute is only about full and consanguine siblings.
Worked example: a grandfather and three full brothers
Take an estate of £180,000 net, after debts and funeral costs, with no bequest. The deceased leaves his father’s father and three full brothers. Nobody else.
On Abu Hanifa’s view, the grandfather takes the entire £180,000 and the brothers take nothing.
Under the majority view, compare the grandfather’s options. Sharing as one of four gives him one quarter, which is £45,000. One third of the estate gives him £60,000. He takes the better of the two, so £60,000, and the three brothers divide the remaining £120,000 at £40,000 each. Check the total: £60,000 + £40,000 + £40,000 + £40,000 = £180,000.
That is a £120,000 swing on the same four relatives and the same estate, decided by nothing except which school the family follows. It is the clearest single illustration of why “which madhhab” is not a pedantic question.
The Ja’fari system is a different architecture
Twelver Shia (Ja’fari) inheritance is not the Sunni scheme with adjustments. It is organised on a different principle, and describing it as a variant does it a disservice.
Heirs fall into three classes. The first holds parents and children, and below the children, grandchildren and their descendants without limit. The second holds grandparents and siblings, and the siblings’ descendants. The third holds paternal and maternal uncles and aunts and their descendants. A spouse inherits alongside whichever class is inheriting, rather than sitting in any class. No one in a later class takes anything while a single person in an earlier class survives, and within a class the nearer degree excludes the more remote.
Four consequences are worth knowing.
Residuary heirs, in the Sunni sense, do not exist. There is no line of male agnates waiting to collect a surplus, so where fixed shares fall short the remainder returns within the inheriting class rather than travelling outward to a paternal cousin.
A lone daughter therefore takes the whole estate. Her father’s brothers are third class and excluded by her presence entirely, which is the most visible practical difference between the two systems.
Relatives through a female link are not a separate residual category. A daughter’s son is a first-class heir on the same footing as a son’s son.
Proportional reduction is rejected. Where the Sunni schools shrink every share when the fractions overshoot, Ja’fari jurists place the shortfall on particular heirs, typically the daughters or the full and consanguine sisters, rather than spreading it across everyone.
There is also a distinctive rule, held by many Ja’fari jurists, that a childless widow does not inherit the land itself, taking value from buildings and trees rather than a share of the ground. Codified practice on that point varies, and anyone it might affect should ask a scholar of the school rather than trusting a summary written from outside it.
Four family shapes, side by side
Every figure below assumes a net estate after funeral costs, debts and any bequest, with no other surviving heirs than those listed.
| Surviving heirs | Hanafi | Shafi’i | Maliki | Hanbali | Ja’fari |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| One daughter, one paternal uncle | Daughter 1/2, uncle 1/2 | Same | Same | Same | Daughter takes all |
| One daughter, nobody else | Daughter takes all by radd | 1/2, rest to the treasury classically | 1/2, rest to the treasury classically | Daughter takes all by radd | Daughter takes all |
| A daughter’s son, nobody else | Takes all as distant kindred | To the treasury classically | To the treasury classically | Takes all as distant kindred | Takes all, first class |
| Grandfather, three full brothers | Grandfather takes all | Grandfather 1/3, brothers 2/9 each | Grandfather 1/3, brothers 2/9 each | Grandfather 1/3, brothers 2/9 each | Divided within the second class |
Read the middle two rows with the modern practice note attached. The classical Shafi’i and Maliki answer sent the surplus to the treasury, but a country with either school as its base will often apply radd or admit distant kindred by statute today. What a fiqh manual says and what a court there orders are two questions, and you need both answers.
Worked example: four heirs, three different answers
The case jurists call al-Akdariyya has been used to test students for centuries, because it is where the grandfather dispute and the fixed shares collide. Take a net estate of £270,000, chosen so the fractions land on round numbers.
Picture a woman survived by her husband, her mother, one full sister, and her paternal grandfather.
On the position associated with Zayd ibn Thabit, which Malik and al-Shafi’i follow, you start with the fixed shares: husband one half, mother one third, grandfather one sixth, sister one half. Over sixths that is 3 + 2 + 1 + 3 = 9 sixths, so the shares overshoot and proportional reduction applies, giving a denominator of 9. The grandfather and the sister then pool their portions and redivide them two to one, which needs the denominator tripled to 27 to stay in whole numbers.
- Husband: 9/27 = £90,000
- Mother: 6/27 = £60,000
- Grandfather: 8/27 = £80,000
- Sister: 4/27 = £40,000
- Total: £90,000 + £60,000 + £80,000 + £40,000 = £270,000
On Abu Hanifa’s view the grandfather excludes the sister, and the arithmetic becomes much simpler because nothing overshoots. Husband one half is £135,000, mother one third is £90,000, grandfather one sixth is £45,000. Total: £270,000, with the sister receiving nothing.
Under the Ja’fari scheme, the mother is a first-class heir, while the grandfather and sister are both second class and excluded outright. The husband takes his fixed half, £135,000. The mother takes her fixed third, £90,000, and the remaining £45,000 returns to her, because the surplus does not go to a spouse. She ends on £135,000.
Three defensible readings, three different sets of numbers, one family. Hanbali jurists follow Zayd on the general grandfather question, though this particular case has its own reported variations, and I would not want to give you a single Hanbali figure with more confidence than the sources support.
To see how your own list of survivors behaves before any of this becomes an argument, the Islamic Inheritance Calculator lays out the fixed shares, the blocking and the residue in one pass, entirely in your browser, so the list of your relatives and the value of your mother’s flat never leaves the device. Print the result and take that to your scholar rather than a family argument.
How national codes picked and mixed
Modern statutes rarely reproduce one school exactly. Legislators have generally started from the dominant local school and borrowed from others where they wanted a different result.
Egypt codified inheritance in 1943 and wills in 1946, starting from a Hanafi base and departing from it deliberately, most famously by creating the obligatory bequest for the children of a predeceased child. Morocco’s family code, the Mudawwana, sits on a Maliki foundation and was substantially revised in 2004, extending that bequest to a predeceased daughter’s children. Pakistan’s Muslim Family Laws Ordinance 1961 went further in section 4, giving the children of a predeceased child the share their parent would have taken outright, a provision argued over on religious and constitutional grounds ever since.
Malaysia works through state-level Syariah enactments on a broadly Shafi’i base, with the Syariah court issuing a faraid certificate that the civil distribution machinery then applies. Indonesia’s Compilation of Islamic Law, in force since 1991, is Shafi’i in origin and recognises substitute heirs. Saudi courts apply an uncodified body of law closest to the Hanbali school. Iranian succession law follows the Ja’fari scheme.
India runs a different model again. The Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act 1937 makes Islamic law the applicable law for Muslims in succession, and Indian courts apply Hanafi rules to Sunni estates and Ja’fari rules to Shia ones. The sibling piece on making a distribution legally stick covers the jurisdiction side properly.
The takeaway from all of that is a caution rather than a rule. Naming your school does not settle what a court will order, and naming your country does not settle what your scholar will advise. You often need both answers.
Choosing a school without pretending one is right
People want a recommendation here and I am not going to give one, because the honest answer is that this is a question of taqlid and community rather than arithmetic.
What I would offer instead is an ordering. Start with the school your family actually follows, which for most people is settled by where their parents come from rather than by any decision they ever made. Check whether the country holding the assets applies a code that differs, because the code governs what a court will enforce. Where the two diverge, the gap is bridgeable: adult heirs may, once shares have vested, agree among themselves to a different division, and they frequently do.
Where the divergence is large and the family is not of one mind, get the fiqh position in writing before anyone starts moving money. A written position is much easier to discuss than a remembered phone call.
Mistakes worth avoiding
The commonest failure is a calculator that does not state its assumptions. If a tool gives you a number without telling you whether it applied radd, whether it admitted distant kindred, and what it did with a grandfather sitting alongside brothers, you cannot check the answer against your own school. Ask what it assumed. If it will not say, treat the output as a rough draft.
Next is treating a classical position as current law. Someone reads that the Maliki school directs the surplus to the treasury, concludes a Moroccan court will do the same, and is wrong. Doctrine and code have diverged in most Muslim-majority countries, generally towards giving more to close relatives.
Third is assuming Shia rules are simply more generous to daughters and stopping there. They are more generous to a lone daughter, substantially so. They are not uniformly more generous, they move siblings and grandparents in ways that cut both directions, and treating “Shia” as shorthand for “the answer I preferred” is not a serious use of another school’s fiqh.
Fourth is a valuation problem rather than a fiqh one, and it causes more fights than any of the above. Where assets sit in several countries, agree the valuation date and the exchange rate before shares are calculated, not after. A currency converter settles the rate question in a minute, and a percentage calculator helps when you need to restate fractions for relatives who find percentages easier.
Fifth, and this one is quiet: people announce a school mid-dispute because it produces the answer they want. That is visible to everybody in the room, and it usually costs more in family relations than the disputed share is worth.
Step by step: working out which ruleset applies to you
- Write down the school your family follows. If you genuinely do not know, ask the imam of the mosque your parents attended rather than guessing from nationality.
- Write down where each significant asset is located, by country. Assets in different countries can end up under different rules.
- List every survivor with their exact relationship, then mark which of them are fixed sharers, which are residuaries, and which are relatives through a female link.
- Ask whether any surplus arises after the fixed shares. If it does and there is no residuary heir, you have hit the radd question and the school matters.
- Ask whether the surviving relatives include only people connected through a female link. If so, you have hit the dhawu al-arham question and the school matters.
- Ask whether a paternal grandfather is inheriting alongside full or consanguine brothers. If so, you have hit the oldest dispute in the subject.
- If none of steps four to six apply, the four Sunni schools will almost certainly give you the same numbers, and you can stop worrying about which one is running.
- Put the fixed shares over a common denominator and check they sum correctly. A fraction calculator is faster than doing it on the back of an envelope, and the faraid calculator will do the blocking as well.
- Take the result to a scholar of your school and, separately, to a lawyer where the assets sit.
Frequently asked questions
Do the four Sunni schools disagree about the Quranic shares themselves?
No. The fixed fractions in Surah An-Nisa 4:11, 4:12 and 4:176 are common ground, as is the order of payment, the two-to-one ratio between sons and daughters, and the main blocking rules. The disagreements sit around the edges of the system rather than at its centre, which is why most ordinary estates come out identically in all four.
Which madhhab should I choose in a faraid calculator?
The one your family follows, cross-checked against the law of the country where the estate sits. If those two point different ways, the court decides the legal outcome and your scholar advises on the moral one. Adult heirs can also agree between themselves to a different split once shares have vested, which settles many of these cases quietly.
Does the Maliki school apply radd?
Classical Maliki doctrine did not. Where fixed shares did not exhaust the estate and no residuary heir existed, the remainder went to the public treasury. Later Maliki jurists accepted returning it to the sharers where no properly administered treasury exists, and most modern codes in Maliki-majority countries apply radd in practice.
What is the main difference between Sunni and Shia inheritance?
The Ja’fari school rejects the residuary heir structure and sorts relatives into three classes: parents and children, then grandparents and siblings, then uncles and aunts. Nobody in a later class inherits while an earlier class survives. In practice a lone daughter takes the whole estate and paternal uncles are excluded entirely.
What is the grandfather and brothers problem?
It is the oldest live disagreement in faraid. Abu Hanifa held that a paternal grandfather stands in the father’s place and excludes the deceased’s brothers completely. Malik, al-Shafi’i, Ahmad and Abu Hanifa’s own two students followed Zayd ibn Thabit, giving the grandfather the more favourable of a brother’s portion, a third of the residue, or a sixth of the estate.
Who are dhawu al-arham and do they inherit?
They are relatives connected through a female link who are neither fixed sharers nor residuaries: a daughter’s children, a sister’s children, a maternal grandfather, maternal uncles and aunts. Hanafi and Hanbali jurists admit them once sharers and residuaries are exhausted. Classical Shafi’i and Maliki doctrine excluded them in favour of the public treasury.
What this is actually for
If you take one thing from this, make it the diagnostic in steps four to six. Most families never touch the contested ground at all, and a great deal of anxiety about madhhabs is spent on estates where every school would produce the same figures. Finding that out takes about ten minutes.
Where your family does land on a contested case, the difference can be very large, as the grandfather example shows at £120,000 on a modest estate. That is the moment to stop reading and start asking, of a scholar who knows your school and a lawyer who knows your jurisdiction. Neither this article nor any calculator can carry that decision, and neither should try.