The Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025 came into force on 8 April 2025 and renamed the parent statute the Unified Waqf Management, Empowerment, Efficiency and Development Act, 1995. In September 2025 the Supreme Court refused to stay the Act as a whole, and stayed three of its limbs.
In 2026 the Supreme Court removed a direction placing the Kerala State Waqf Board under the supervision of a government officer, and asked the High Court to decide the underlying dispute quickly. The High Court had imposed that supervision after noting that the Board was constituted without the non-Muslim members and the Shia member the 2025 amendment requires, and its restraint on major expenditure stayed in place. The order matters here because it shows the amended composition rules being enforced against a Board while the constitutional challenge to those same rules is still undecided.
This article traces the waqf regime as it stood before 2025, what the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025 changed, and where the Supreme Court’s interim verdict leaves it.
The whole of the interim order turns on who decides whether a piece of land is waqf, and at what point that decision starts to bite. A worked example makes the sequence concrete. Take a burial ground and the plot beside it, entered in a State Waqf Board’s list in the 1960s, used for burials ever since, never registered under the Waqf Act, 1995, and with no surviving waqf deed.
The State designates an officer above the rank of Collector, who opens an inquiry under Section 3C of the amended Act on the footing that the plot is government land. As the amendment was drafted, the property was not to be treated as waqf property until that officer submitted his report, and once he reported it to be government land, he could correct the revenue record himself.
Neither step is available today. The property keeps its waqf character while the inquiry runs, the revenue record cannot be altered on the officer’s report, and the question of title goes to the Waqf Tribunal under Section 83, with an appeal to the High Court. Nobody may create third-party rights over the plot in the meantime. How the law arrived at that position starts with the statute the 2025 Act amended.
The waqf regime as it stood before the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025
The waqf regime before the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025 rested on the Waqf Act, 1995 and on a line of Supreme Court decisions that had already settled how far the State may regulate a religious endowment. A waqf is a permanent dedication of movable or immovable property, made by a person, for a purpose that Muslim law recognises as pious, religious or charitable. Once the dedication happens, the property leaves the founder’s ownership permanently.
Section 3(r) of the 1995 Act carried that definition, and expressly included a waqf by user, meaning a property treated as waqf because it has long been used as one rather than because a deed says so. Administration ran on two tiers: a State Waqf Board surveyed properties, published a list of waqfs and supervised the mutawallis, while a Waqf Tribunal under Section 83 decided disputes and Section 85 barred the civil court. Our post on waqf under Muslim law sets out the substantive law of dedication.
One feature of that machinery does most of the work in the 2025 litigation. Registration of a waqf has been a statutory duty in every Indian waqf enactment since 1923, and no Act in that century-long line ever treated an unregistered waqf as beyond the reach of the requirement. When the Supreme Court came to decide whether the deletion of waqf by user could be stayed, that unbroken duty is what it reached for.
From the Mussalman Wakf Act, 1923 to the Waqf Act, 1995
The line from the Mussalman Wakf Act, 1923 to the Waqf Act, 1995 runs through four statutes and one committee report, and every one of them required waqfs to be registered or listed.
The Mussalman Wakf Act, 1923 came first. Its Statement of Objects and Reasons recorded how waqf provisions were being misused to defeat creditors and avoid legal proceedings. The Act obliged the mutawalli to furnish particulars of the waqf, publish them, file statements of account and submit to audit and verification, with a penalty under Section 10 for non-compliance.
The Bengal Wakf Act, 1934 is where waqf by user first appears in a statutory definition. Section 6(10) defined a wakf as a permanent dedication by a person professing Islam of property for a purpose recognised by Islamic law as pious, religious or charitable, and said the definition “includes a wakf by user”. The phrase entered the statute book as an inclusion, not as a freestanding right.
After independence Parliament enacted the Wakf Act, 1954, which recognised waqf by user in Section 3(l)(i) and built the survey machinery later Acts inherited. Section 4 required the State Government to appoint a Commissioner of Wakfs to inquire into existing wakfs and report. Section 5 required the Board to examine that report and publish a list of wakfs in the Official Gazette. Sections 25 to 28 covered registration and the register, and Section 41 carried penalties.
The 1954 Act did not settle the position. A Wakf Enquiry Committee appointed by the Central Government in 1969 and 1970 recommended a provision on the model of Section 55E of the Bombay Public Trusts Act, 1950, to stop mutawallis evading the law. Parliament tried to give effect to that through the Wakf (Amendment) Act, 1984, which was never brought fully into force.
The Waqf Act, 1995 replaced the 1954 Act. It kept waqf by user in Section 3(r)(i), kept the survey and listing machinery, and required registration of every waqf under Section 36 whether created before or after commencement. Section 87 barred a suit to enforce a right on behalf of an unregistered waqf. Our explainer on the essential provisions of the Waqf Act, 1995 works through that structure.
Section 87 lasted until the Wakf (Amendment) Act, 2013 deleted it. The same amendment inserted Section 108A, which gave the Act overriding effect over inconsistent laws, and strengthened the Tribunal’s jurisdiction. So by the time Parliament returned to the statute in 2025, registration had been a legal obligation for 102 years.
One detail of the 1995 scheme is worth holding on to, because the Supreme Court later built an argument on it. Registration under the 1995 Act never required a waqf deed. Where no deed had been executed, or where a copy could not be obtained, the applicant could register by giving full particulars of the origin, nature and objects of the waqf as far as they were known to him. A waqf with no paperwork at all could therefore have been registered at any point in those thirty years.
Landmark judgment on limits of state control over waqf
The limits on state control over waqf were fixed not by the waqf statutes but by a line of Supreme Court decisions on Articles 25 and 26, running from 1954 to 2021. The 2025 challenge had to be argued inside the space they left.
The first is Commissioner, Hindu Religious Endowments, Madras v. Sri Lakshmindra Thirtha Swamiar of Sri Shirur Mutt, decided by seven judges in 1954. It gave Indian law the essential religious practices doctrine, under which what counts as religion is determined by reference to the doctrines of that religion itself. On Article 26(d), which protects a denomination’s right to administer its property in accordance with law, the Court drew the line that still governs: only a law that takes the right of administration away from the denomination altogether, and vests it in a secular authority, offends the clause. Regulation short of that survives.
The second is Ratilal Panachand Gandhi v. State of Bombay, decided the same year by a Constitution Bench, which struck down Section 44 of the Bombay Public Trusts Act. Religious practices, it held, are as much a part of religion as religious doctrine, and constitutional protection extends to what is essential and integral to the faith. Together the two 1954 decisions fixed the working distinction: the State may regulate the secular administration of religious property, but it may not take over the religion.
Durgah Committee, Ajmer v. Syed Hussain Ali is the waqf case in the sequence, decided in March 1961. The khadims of a Sufi shrine at Ajmer challenged the Durgah Khwaja Saheb Act, 1955, claiming a right under Article 26 to administer the endowment and its offerings. The Court upheld the statute. Article 26 protects the managerial rights a denomination actually possesses, and the Chishti Soofis had never held rights of management over the endowment in the centuries since it was created.
Sardar Syedna Taher Saifuddin Saheb v. State of Bombay, decided in 1962, ran the other way. The head of the Dawoodi Bohra community claimed that excommunication of a member was an essential religious practice, the Court agreed, and the statute curtailing it could not stand. Set beside Durgah Committee, the two cases mark the boundary: administration is open to regulation, practice is not.
Two later decisions dealt with how far a Waqf Board’s own determination reaches. In Board of Muslim Wakfs, Rajasthan v. Radha Kishan, decided in October 1978, the Court held that a stranger to the waqf, not being a person interested in it, was not bound by the one-year limitation in Section 6(1) of the 1954 Act, and that publication of the list of wakfs was not final and conclusive against such a person. A Board could list a property, but the listing never decided title against an outsider.
In Sayyed Ali v. Andhra Pradesh Wakf Board, decided in January 1998, the Court went the other way on the durability of a dedication. Property endowed for the maintenance and services of a dargah retains its waqf character, and a later grant of patta to a mokhasadar under the Inams Act does not undo it. The Court also held that the Tahsildar under the Inams Act had no jurisdiction to decide the waqf character of the property, so his decision could not operate as res judicata.
That jurisdictional point was reinforced in Rashid Wali Beg v. Farid Pindari in October 2021. The Court read Section 83 of the 1995 Act as conferring wide jurisdiction on the Tribunal over disputes relating both to a waqf and to waqf property, with Section 85 barring the civil court.
The last piece of the frame came in Dr. M. Ismail Faruqui v. Union of India in October 1994, on the acquisition of land at Ayodhya. The Court held that a mosque is not an essential part of the practice of Islam and that namaz may be offered anywhere, including in the open, unless the place has particular significance. It added the proposition that does the most work in 2025: Articles 25 and 26 protect the right to practise religion, not a right to acquire, own or possess property. Our post on the right to freedom of religion sets out those Articles in full.
Changes in the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025
The Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025 changed who may create a waqf, what counts as waqf property, who sits on the bodies that administer it, and which limitation rules apply to a claim over waqf land. The amending Act runs to more than forty sections. When the challenge reached the Supreme Court, the Court identified Sections 4, 5, 10, 12, 16, 21, 43, 44 and 45 of the amending Act as the contentious ones, because those rewrote Sections 3(r), 3C, 3D, 3E, 9, 14, 23, 36, 104, 107, 108 and 108A of the parent statute.
Its passage was quick and contested. The Lok Sabha passed the Bill on 3 April 2025 by 288 votes to 232 and the Rajya Sabha passed it the next day by 128 to 95. The President gave assent on 5 April 2025, and the Central Government brought the Act into force by gazette notification on 8 April 2025. A Joint Parliamentary Committee had examined the Bill before that, and opposition members boycotted some of its sittings.
The amendment also renamed the statute it was amending. The Waqf Act, 1995 is now the Unified Waqf Management, Empowerment, Efficiency and Development Act, 1995, which is where the shorthand “UMEED Act” comes from. It added definitions for Aghakhani waqf and Bohra waqf, recognising those communities separately for the first time.
The changes sort into two groups, and the litigation followed the same split. One group governs what a waqf is and which property it can cover. The other governs who runs the system.
Who can create a waqf
After the amendment, only a person who is the lawful owner of the property, competent to transfer or dedicate it, and able to show that he has been practising Islam for at least five years may create a waqf. The first two conditions come from the new Section 3A. The third sits in the definition itself, in Section 3(r), which now speaks of a waqf created by “any person showing or demonstrating that he is professing Islam for at least five years”.
Section 3A carries a second limb that drew less attention than the five-year rule and may matter more in practice. A waqf-alal-aulad, the family waqf under which the founder reserves benefits for his descendants, must not result in denial of the inheritance rights of the heirs, including women heirs. The provision turns a customary protection into a statutory condition on the validity of the dedication.
What counts as waqf property
What counts as waqf property is narrower after the amendment in three ways: waqf by user has left the definition, government property is placed outside it, and protected monuments and Scheduled Tribe land are barred from it outright.
The deletion of waqf by user drew the loudest objection. Clause (i) of Section 3(r) of the 1995 Act had said that a waqf includes a waqf by user, and that such a waqf does not cease to be a waqf merely because the user has ceased, however long the cesser. That clause is gone. Waqf-by-user properties registered on or before commencement remain waqf, except where the property is wholly or partly in dispute or is government property. The saving therefore turns entirely on registration: a waqf by user that was registered survives the amendment, and one that was never registered has nothing in the amended definition to stand on.
Section 3C is the enforcement mechanism attached to that policy, and the Supreme Court later split it apart. Sub-section (1) says that any government property identified or declared as waqf, before or after commencement, shall not be deemed waqf property. Sub-section (2) lets the State Government designate an officer above the rank of Collector to inquire and determine whether a property is government property, with a proviso that the property “shall not be treated as waqf property till the designated officer submits his report”. Sub-sections (3) and (4) then let that officer correct the revenue records and require the State Government to direct the Board to correct its own.
Section 3D takes protected monuments out of the waqf system. Any waqf declaration or notification is void if the property was a protected monument or protected area under the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act, 1904 or the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958 at the time. The Archaeological Survey of India had told the Joint Parliamentary Committee that mutawallis were obstructing conservation work at monuments carrying both notifications.
Section 3E draws a similar exclusion for tribal land. No land belonging to members of Scheduled Tribes under the Fifth or Sixth Schedule to the Constitution may be declared or deemed waqf property, and a non-obstante clause makes it override the rest of the Act. The Committee had recorded waqf declarations over land in those areas.
Authorities over waqf system after the 2025 amendment
The Central Waqf Council and the State Waqf Boards still run the system, and what the amendment changed is who may sit on them. The Council under Section 9 has 22 members and a Board under Section 14 has 11. In each, only clause (c) requires its members to be drawn from the Muslim community, and every other category is silent on religion. That silence is the drafting feature that turned composition into a constitutional question, because a provision that does not require Muslim members in a category permits non-Muslim members in it. Our post on the Central Waqf Council covers the body’s functions.
Section 14 carries provisos that pull in different directions. Two of the members appointed under it must be women, and two, excluding ex-officio members, must be non-Muslim. The Board must have at least one member each from the Shia, Sunni and other backward classes among Muslim communities, and one each from the Bohra and Aghakhani communities where they have functional auqaf in the State. No Minister may be nominated.
Section 23 governs the Board’s Chief Executive Officer. As amended, it requires a full-time officer appointed by the State Government, not below the rank of Joint Secretary, who is the ex-officio Secretary of the Board. Nothing in the text requires that officer to be a Muslim, and the petitioners argued that a non-Muslim CEO would interfere directly in the community’s religious affairs.
Registration was tightened at both ends. Section 3B requires waqf details to be filed on a central portal and database. Section 36(10) bars a suit or proceeding to enforce a right on behalf of an unregistered waqf, subject to a six-month window from commencement and a proviso allowing a later application where the applicant shows sufficient cause. In substance it revives what Section 87 did between 1995 and 2013.
Section 107 made a quiet change with wide consequences. The Limitation Act, 1963 now applies to any proceeding relating to a claim or interest in immovable property comprised in a waqf. Before the amendment it did not apply to a suit for possession of waqf immovable property, so a Board could sue on a decades-old encroachment without meeting a limitation bar that binds every other property owner.
Three provisions were deleted outright. Section 104 had allowed a person not professing Islam to donate property for the support of a waqf, the property then being deemed comprised in it. Section 108 was a special provision for evacuee waqf properties, drafted around the Administration of Evacuee Property Act, 1950. Section 108A, inserted only in 2013, had given the Waqf Act overriding effect.
Every one of these changes was challenged. Petitions reached the Supreme Court within days of commencement, and by the middle of April 2025 the Court had clubbed them and begun hearing them.
Where the Supreme Court’s interim verdict leaves the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025
The Supreme Court’s interim verdict of September 2025 left the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025 in force, stayed three of its limbs, capped the number of non-Muslim members on the Council and the Boards, and decided nothing finally. The decision is reported as In Re: The Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025, and the full text runs to 128 pages on the Court’s own site.
A two-judge Bench heard a batch of writ petitions led by five lead matters, filed by Members of Parliament, political parties and religious organisations, with the challenge grounded on Articles 14, 15, 19, 21, 25, 26, 29, 30 and 300A. The Court clubbed the petitions and directed that they be heard under a single title.
At hearings in April 2025 the Court narrowed the interim exercise to three issues: the prospective de-recognition of waqf by user under Section 3(r), the treatment of government property under Section 3C, and non-Muslim membership of the Council and the Boards. It also recorded the Union’s assurance that no waqf would be denotified and no fresh appointments made to the Council or the Boards before the next hearing. Arguments on interim relief were heard in May 2025 and the orders were reserved, and the judgment followed in September.
Before turning to any of them the Court set its threshold, and that threshold explains most of what follows. Relying on Mohd. Hanif Quareshi v. State of Bihar, Hamdard Dawakhana (Wakf) v. Union of India and Dr. Jaya Thakur v. Union of India, it restated the presumption of constitutionality: a law made by Parliament cannot be declared unconstitutional lightly, and a court must be able to hold beyond doubt that the violation is glaring. A legislature is presumed to understand the needs of its own people, and to have directed its law at problems made manifest by experience.
Hamdard Dawakhana supplies the method that follows from that presumption. In judging an enactment a court considers its true nature and character, the history of the legislation, its purpose, the surrounding circumstances, and the mischief the legislature set out to suppress. Applied here, that method sends the Court to the hundred-year history of waqf registration before it looks at any individual clause. At an interim stage the bar sits higher still, because the applicant asks the Court to suspend a statute before deciding it.
Measured against that threshold, three limbs failed and the rest of the statute survived. The Court stayed the five-year practising-Muslim limb of Section 3(r), the proviso to Section 3C(2), and Sections 3C(3) and (4), and it rejected the prayer to stay the Act as a whole, recording that no case had been made out to stay the provisions of the entire statute.
The stay on the five-year limb is conditional, which is the detail most summaries miss. The words “any person showing or demonstrating that he is professing Islam for at least five years” stand stayed only until the State Government frames rules providing a mechanism to determine whether a person has practised Islam for five years. The reason was practical rather than doctrinal: with no mechanism in place, the requirement invited arbitrary decisions about who qualifies.
So the requirement is dormant, not dead. In any State that frames such rules the condition revives and operates on new dedications there, and the order does not decide whether it is valid.
The proviso to Section 3C(2) fell on a narrower point. It said the property was not to be treated as waqf until the designated officer reported, so a property already declared waqf lost that character the moment an inquiry opened, before anyone had determined anything. Stripping the character before the inquiry is even conducted and reported is, at least prima facie, arbitrary.
Sections 3C(3) and (4) fell on separation of powers, and this is the most consequential part of the order. They let the designated officer correct the revenue records once he determined the property to be government property, and required the State Government to direct the Board to follow. The Court held that entrusting the determination of title to a revenue officer is not in tune with the principle of separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution. Title has to be resolved by a judicial or quasi-judicial authority.
Having said where title cannot be decided, the Court pointed to where it can. Section 83 requires the State Government to constitute as many Tribunals as it thinks fit for the determination of any dispute, question or other matter relating to a waqf or waqf property, and that jurisdiction is wide enough to cover eviction of a tenant and the rights of a lessor and lessee.
The composition is what makes the Tribunal an adequate substitute for the revenue officer. Each Tribunal has three members: a chairman who is or has been a District Judge, an officer equivalent in rank to a Joint Secretary to the State Government, and a person having knowledge of Muslim law and jurisprudence. Section 83(5) deems the Tribunal a civil court with the powers of one under the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, and Section 83(7) gives its decision the force of a civil court decree.
The route out is equally clear. Section 83(9) allows any person aggrieved by an order of the Tribunal to appeal to the High Court within 90 days of receiving it, and the proviso to Section 83(2) allows a direct approach to the High Court where there is no Tribunal or the Tribunal is not functioning.
A protective direction operates while all this runs. Until title under Section 3C is finally decided by the Tribunal, and subject to further orders of the High Court, the waqf is not to be dispossessed and the entries in the revenue record and the Board’s records are not to be affected. From the commencement of the inquiry until final determination, no third-party rights may be created in the property.
On composition the Court capped the numbers without deciding the constitutional question. Reading Sections 9 and 14 plainly, it found that 12 of 22 members of the Council and 7 of 11 of a Board could be non-Muslim, because only clause (c) in each requires Muslim members. It expressly declined to decide whether that amounts to interference in religious practices, and converted the Solicitor General’s statement into a binding direction instead: not more than 4 non-Muslim members out of 22 on the Council, and not more than 3 out of 11 on a Board. It refused to stay Section 23, but directed that as far as possible the Chief Executive Officer be appointed from the Muslim community.
That is the whole of what the Court disturbed. Every other limb of the challenge failed at this stage: the deletion of waqf by user, Sections 3C(1) and (2), 3D, 3E, 36(10) and 107, and the deletions of Sections 104, 108 and 108A all stand. On each the Court recorded a prima facie view and left the final argument open.
Waqf by user is the refusal that matters most, and the reasoning is entirely historical. Registration has been required in every waqf enactment since 1923. If mutawallis did not register across 102 years of statutory obligation, the Court said, they cannot now claim to continue as unregistered waqfs. The 30 years under the 1995 Act alone were treated as enough.
The petitioners’ strongest practical answer was that many old waqfs have no deed at all, so registration was never realistically open to them. The Court did not accept it, because the 1995 Act had never made a deed mandatory: where none had been executed or no copy could be obtained, an applicant could apply by giving full particulars of the origin, nature and objects of the waqf as far as they were known.
The Court also recorded that the deletion operates prospectively. On the Solicitor General’s submission, the removal of clause (i) of Section 3(r) takes effect from the date the amending Act came into force, so the fear that land already vested in waqfs would be taken by the Government was held, prima facie, to hold no water. That is the difference between an amendment that unsettles existing endowments and one that does not.
Behind the policy the Court set out a concrete instance. The Andhra Pradesh Waqf Board had notified thousands of acres of government land as waqf property, and the State had to move the High Court, which dismissed its petition. On the State’s appeal the Supreme Court quashed the notification and held that the lands vested in the State or the Corporation. Having seen that, a legislature abolishing the concept prospectively cannot be said to act arbitrarily.
Sections 3C(1) and (2) survived on a proposition the Court stated flatly. Government property is the property of the citizens of India, held by the Government in trust for them, and a person in wrongful possession cannot claim it as his own. A provision letting the State designate a senior officer to inquire and report is therefore not prima facie arbitrary. What could not survive was letting that officer decide title.
Sections 3D and 3E were answered on their own terms. On protected monuments, the argument that Muslims would lose religious practice failed because Section 5(6) of the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958 lets citizens continue their customary religious practices even at a protected monument. On tribal land, the Court placed Section 3E alongside decisions upholding restrictions on transfer of land held by Scheduled Tribes, and treated it as protective legislation rather than a burden on waqfs.
The remaining refusals are shorter but the reasoning on Section 36(10) is worth setting out, because it repeats the historical method. The Court traced the bar on suits by unregistered waqfs back to the Statement of Objects and Reasons of the 1923 Act, and to the Waqf Enquiry Committee of 1969 and 1970, which had recommended a provision on the model of Section 55E of the Bombay Public Trusts Act, 1950 to stop mutawallis running from the law. An equivalent stood as Section 87 from 1995 to 2013. On that footing the provision brings waqf suits into parity with suits under comparable trust statutes rather than discriminating against them, and the six-month window with its sufficient-cause proviso gives ample time. Section 107 survived because applying the Limitation Act, 1963 removes a discrimination the unamended Act had created rather than creating one. The challenge to the deletion of Section 104 was held self-contradictory: if waqf is specific to Islam, as the petitioners argued, removing the clause that let non-Muslims endow to a waqf cannot be arbitrary, and such a person may still create or endow a trust. Section 108 had been drafted around the Administration of Evacuee Property Act, 1950, since repealed, and Section 108A had existed only from 2013, so a legislature competent to insert it was competent to delete it.
What remains live, as at August 2026, is most of the case. The Court closed by clarifying that everything it said was a prima facie consideration for deciding whether to grant an interim stay, and that the parties remain free to argue the validity of every provision. The Article 26 question on composition was expressly not decided, and the five-year requirement revives in any State that frames the rules the order refers to. As the Kerala litigation shows, the composition rules are already being fought over in the High Courts while the Supreme Court’s own answer is pending. Our post on the Places of Worship Act, 1991 covers the neighbouring statute on religious character.
Frequently asked questions
Did the Supreme Court strike down the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025?
No. The Court rejected the prayer to stay the entire statute and stayed only three limbs of it, on a prima facie view. It has not decided the constitutional validity of the Act or of any provision in it.
Is waqf by user still valid after the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025?
Waqf by user has been removed from the definition in Section 3(r), and the Supreme Court refused to stay that deletion. The removal is prospective, and waqf-by-user properties registered on or before commencement remain waqf unless the property is in dispute or is government property.
What happens to a waqf property once a Section 3C inquiry begins?
It keeps its waqf character while the inquiry runs, because the proviso that removed it was stayed. The designated officer cannot correct the revenue record, title goes to the Waqf Tribunal under Section 83, and no third-party rights may be created until the Tribunal decides.
How many non-Muslim members can sit on a State Waqf Board now?
Not more than 3 out of 11, under the Supreme Court’s direction, and 4 out of 22 for the Central Waqf Council. The Court set these caps without deciding whether non-Muslim membership offends Article 26.
Does the five-year practising-Muslim requirement apply today?
Not until the State Government frames rules setting out how it will be determined whether a person has practised Islam for five years. The stay is tied to the absence of that mechanism, so the requirement revives once the rules exist.
References
- In Re: The Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025, Supreme Court of India, 15 September 2025: full judgment
- Supreme Court Observer, case page and status
- LiveLaw, Supreme Court order on the Kerala State Waqf Board, July 2026
- Ministry of Minority Affairs, the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2025
- Commissioner, Hindu Religious Endowments, Madras v. Sri Lakshmindra Thirtha Swamiar of Sri Shirur Mutt (1954): judgment
- Durgah Committee, Ajmer v. Syed Hussain Ali (1961): judgment
- Board of Muslim Wakfs, Rajasthan v. Radha Kishan (1979): judgment
- Dr. M. Ismail Faruqui v. Union of India (1994): judgment
- Sayyed Ali v. Andhra Pradesh Wakf Board (1998): judgment
- Rashid Wali Beg v. Farid Pindari (2021): judgment
This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For advice on a specific waqf property or a pending proceeding, consult a qualified advocate.
