What is a Henson trust and can a Muslim family use one?

No classical school was ever asked this, and we found no ruling on it from any recognised body. That is the honest starting point, and this entry does not paper over it with an invented four-school table about trusts. What the classical sources do supply is the principle the question would be decided by, and there the schools are recorded as differing. Ownership (milk) is defined as a legally recognised enablement to take the benefit of a thing and to take a price for it; the mark of complete ownership, on Ibn Taymiyya’s account, is that the holder can sell it, give it away — and that it is inherited from him. A person who can only hope that a trustee will choose him has none of that. What he has is at best a claim of the kind the schools argue about: the Malikis, Shafi’is and Hanbalis define an estate as everything the deceased left of property and established rights, without restriction, while the Hanafis confine it to property, or a right connected to property, clear of anyone else’s claim on the thing itself.

All four Sunni schools researched and sourced. Reviewed 2026-09-01. Full positions, evidence and sources — A discretionary trust interest — is anything owned?.