Death's paperwork

[vampyrichamster]

For all that I've raved about food, my reason for returning to Malaysia this time was to settle unavoidable life-related paperwork. This included understanding a little bit better how financial distributions after death worked for Muslims in my country. Muslim inheritance laws and their related finance laws are insanely complex. Reading up on the procedures is both straightforward, in that there is an instruction for every one thing you need to do, and headache-inducing, in that there are a lot of instructions and there's a lot of things to do. This is true for anybody's death: an executor is responsible for tracking down a person's lifetime. The major amount of teeth-gnashing on understanding Islamic inheritance laws is realising how the laws were created for a specific, now largely historic, era and the vast amount of energy needed to work around the framework.

 

Part of the mandatory education for Malaysian Muslim-descent students up into college is to learn about how traditional Muslim inheritance distribution works. In a nutshell, there's a portion for wives, a portion for children where sons get twice the amount over daughters, a portion for the deceased's parents and a portion for their siblings with particular attention to their brothers. Adopted children do not automatically inherit. In fact, when I was kid, people even said that Muslims were not allowed to have wills. This is untrue. The glitch is that wills only apply to distributing ¹⁄₃ of a person's overall assets.

 

In Malaysia, an entire industry has sprung up within the Islamic financial sector to create means for Muslims to divide their wealth according to individual choice. At least as I see it, this involves a lot of careful renaming and rewording of common financial concepts, and establishing endowments. Endowments are legally conceptualised as gifts, so they're non-contestable. It's also not a 'new' idea. Histories I've read about the Baghdad Caliphate have mentioned fathers endowing specific properties to their daughters upon death that were to be managed by male intermediaries. The basic process of handling liquid and non-liquid assets is roughly the same for Muslims and non-Muslims. You inform the Civil or Syariah court or Land Office that an asset's owner is deceased, have them issue a letter of administration (i.e. power of attorney) where you name an executor, the executor gains power to settle the deceased's debts, liquidate/transfer as necessary and divide out said asset. As with any inheritance, potential claimants can interject and this is where that list of potential claimants according to Muslim law can really throw a wrench. 

 

Say a husband dies leaving a spouse and children, with no living parents. If he was non-Muslim, his spouse gets ¹⁄₃ of his assets, ²⁄₃ is divided between the children. Roughly: If he was a Muslim, his spouse is entitled to ¹⁄₈ of his assets, the rest of his assets are divided between the sons and daughters at a 2:1 ratio. If both his parents were alive, they are each entitled to ¹⁄₆ of the assets. Theoretically, if there are children, none of the siblings have the right to inherit. If there is no son, siblings (particularly brothers) and other relatives may be entitled to a portion of assets. This is a historical relic. The assumption was that back in the mythical dark ages, women were less educated on financial matters, or if I may be so snide, "more prone to feelings". Women were at least more obliged to stay at home, leaving business and legal transactions on their behalf to male intermediaries who could move outside. The more 'capable' male relatives who received inheritance were expected to use their inheritance money on behalf of caring for the deceased's widow and daughters. You don't want me to start ranting about how capable women of the time actually were at managing money.

 

There's also the issue of who has power over managing the assets upon that Muslim husband's death. This is especially onerous if the children are underaged. Remember, the wife receives ¹⁄₈, which she can use freely. She does not have automatic power over the share left for underaged children. Depending on the Syariah court, control over the underaged children's share goes to either the paternal grandfather (i.e. deceased husband's father) or the Public Trust Corp. (Malaysia's default public institution for managing assets on behalf of the deceased, euphemistically, "legacy management"). 

 

This is all still somewhat sanely manageable if we were just dealing with liquid assets. Non-liquid assets require the assent of all beneficiaries as to their share before they can be liquidated. Great if everyone agreed, daughter gets the house, son gets the car. It could take years if every beneficiary fought over their share, even if all they did was tangle up the courts with a potentially 'rightful' claim. As ridiculous as it sounds, some people actually do try to divide parcels of land into implausible triangles. To make everything more fraught for the beneficiaries, depending on some combinations of relatives, portions of assets may also be claimed by the state.

 

If you're wondering, there are also seperate portioning rules for if the deceased is a woman. This is actually where a lot of money could go to the state if you do not have sons and living male relatives. Reading any table of divisions about this is infuriating.

 

By far some of my most amused moments waiting in banks in Malaysia was seeing the ads for the Islamic inheritance products. The tagline for one of them roughly translated to, "Bequeath the money you worked hard for to the people who truly matter." I might have misremembered the wording, but this is what they're hitting people with on the head. In the ad, a father was filling in the forms with his daughter.

 

Learning the rules was incredibly enlightening, insanely frustrating for anyone with an interest in women's studies or history or plausibly a modern individual. Full disclosure, I'm the eldest, the daughter and I am 100% sure I will be responsible for paperwork. No attachment to the inheritance, but paperwork is my duty. I can't even claim to be one of these mythical soft-headed women who make math look bad.

Comments

[armiphlage]

*hugs*

"As ridiculous as it sounds, some people actually do try to divide parcels of land into implausible triangles.

This is why in Quebec (where the Code Napoleon applies for inheritance law), all the farms are divided up into long, skinny rectangles (in addition to dividing the land, they have to divide the access to the river or roadways). Quebec inheritance laws are visible from space.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/BDYW5bxzSY1UMPrSA