Waqf or Law for Muslim endowments: Constructing Religious Singularity for appropriating shrines 15 Waqf or Law for Muslim endowments: Constructing Religious Singularity for appropriating shrines *Umber Bin Ibad Abstract This article shows that the lego-religious development took place during colonial period necessitated to imagine local sacred sites, especially shrines in the form of singular conception of Waqf. The article highlights the development, during colonial judicial and legislative process, that defined such concepts as Sharia, religion and endowment singularly and inhering the needs of newly developing economic system. The development provided with singular explanation for the working of shrines and reduced the pluralistic life-forms. The Muslim community could claim on local shrines as essentially belonging to it. The article shows that the religio-legal development also understood the organizational structure of the local sacred site through universal term that reduced the need for managing the sites through local and customary means. Waqf stands as a legal concept for defining certain form of endowments, exclusively attached with the practices of Muslims. After the West Pakistan Waqf Properties Ordinance of 1959 the state of Pakistan has legally appropriated this concept for understanding and taking over this form of property. After the promulgation of the Act, though many other Acts for the same purpose were enforced, no government ever felt the need to change the basic meaning and understanding of the concept of Waqf. Treading upon its understanding, the state changed forcefully the traditional care takers of the local sacred sites with its own bureaucracy and took control on the hundreds of Waqf properties, including shrines, Mosques, Takias, etc. From then on, a visitor of such sites find, instead of Mutwalli and Mujawar (the traditional care takers), managers of Auqaf department, created to take care the taken over Waqf property. The nationalization of the Waqf properties not only gave control to the State on around 78000 acres of agricultural land, but also provided with the monthly cash income of millions of rupees. However, all such activities took place because of the religio-legal meaning of Waqf and its application in specific way. Interestingly, the Ordinance of 1959 attaches itself with the British colonial legal and judicial tradition. 1 It therefore creates a need to understand the development of this concept within colonial legal and judicial process. This article will try to trace the development of Waqf laws and the conception of Waqf property as they emerged during the Colonial lego-judicial process. The article follows those like Nicholas Dirk and Erik Stokes who consider the development of Colonial Law as a development in the enlargement of its influence, and to dispense the new truths. 2 ____________________________________________________________________ *Assistant Professor, F.C College University, Lahore.