ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses data on the gender, age and personal status of waqf founders in an attempt to find a correlation between these indicators and the motives for creating endowments. Unlike research on the middle Ages, it is possible to obtain personal details on founders during the Mandate, because many of them are still alive and have consented to being interviewed. The most detailed corpus of data on the formation of waqfs is the survey by Barkan and Ayverdyon Istanbul waqfs. According to the data in this survey, 2515 endowments were made in Istanbul by 1546 on average 2530 per year. Another source of information isKmil al-Ghazis book on Aleppo. There, in the second half of the eighteenth century, Muslims created 577 endowments, approximately ten per year. In the nineteenth century, the number of waqf formations decreased. These figures tell us that the number of endowments was much greater in the capital than in a provincial town.
