The orphans of the city of Damascus through the documents of the records of Sharia courts between 1900 – 1918 (Custody - Guardianship - Orphans Fund)

Abstract

The study deals with the subject of the orphans of the city of Damascus between 1900 and 1918, i.e. at the end of the Ottoman control over Damascus, in which the most prominent cases under which minor orphans lived were studied, which are the custody of mother and non-mother women, guardianship of women and men, and the role of the Ottoman state through the orphan money fund, It deals with how society and the state deal with minor orphans, socially and financially, and the methods of preserving their rights, and the injustice they have been subjected to. As well as the society’s culture towards the orphan, and its culture towards his rights, and in the same context the study discusses the role played by the Orphans’ Fund and its importance, and how it was transformed into a bank that takes interest despite the fact that the Islamic religion prohibited usury, with other results reached by the research based on the records of Sharia court documents in Damascus, which documented all the cases that the city's orphans went through, to give a complete historical context, far from studying any of the sources and references, and the fact that there was no previous study on the subject.