Salman is a good boy. At least as far as adult children who are 43, with no job, wife, and prospects for any of these things go. His father, Bilal, loves him, of course. He hopes for the best for him. Bilal has been retired for a few years now and is in his 70s. The parents tried to help out as much as possible, but Salman always had a knack for getting into hair-brained business deals with dodgy “friends,” borrowing cash from his parents and losing it all.
Salman has been to jail a few times, nothing too big, things like an unfortunate bar fight and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He grew up with the wrong kind of friends. Of course, this disturbed his parents, but that was when he was in his 20s and 30s. Today, things are different as Bilal gets older (and Salman with them); Bilal is coming to rely on his son more. Salman starts to berate Bilal more about things like not understanding technology. He wants to handle their banking and finances, but Bilal is reluctant. He is also kind of trapped.
Salman is Bilal’s son, their heir. In their old age, they may come to rely on him more and more. But by doing so, they may subject themselves to poverty in their old age since Salman has never demonstrated any level of responsibility. Salman is many parents’ disappointment.
The challenges can come in many forms for many parents of adult children. Remember, the Quran tells us that children and wealth are fitna. Things have always been this way.
Some other examples of problems with adult children:
- The daughter marries a greedy and manipulative person who routinely gaslights, is dishonest in business dealings, and is not an especially great Muslim from her parent’s perspective. She refuses to leave him and has started to become more distant from her parents because of their judgemental attitude toward her marriage.
- Son has serious substance abuse problems and then marries an enabler, and both take too much money from aging parents.
- A 70-year-old man marries a 41-year-old woman his adult children think is trash [how dare they!] and only interested in money.
- Son won’t pray or fast and has social media posts with a strange fascination around tattoos and craft beer.
First, Don’t Make Things Worse
These problems are vastly different from each other. There is no one solution for all of this. For Muslims, though, there are underlying principles that will guide every single resolution. Those principles will often tell you the wrong choices, but you have to dig deeper to get the right answer. When you have a bad situation in your family, you need to suppress your desires and ensure that your actions are in keeping with your values and not merely your whims.
You don’t see yourself as the villain in your own story, and likely your child does not see themselves that way either. The parent has significant power to make things far worse than they already are.
Example “Are you even Muslim?”:
Faisal has a son, Khalid, who is now 31 years old. Khalid has not spoken to Faisal in about seven years. Faisal has recently heard from friends that Khalid has been posting pictures of himself with various non-Muslim women in suggestive poses, often with what looks like alcohol. He wants to reach out to his son Khalid and ask him, point blank, “Are you still a Muslim”? Faisal should not ask this question. Of course, if the situation between father and son is bad enough, Khalid may say “no” just to be left alone. For Faisal, the question may be engineered to get a particular response, which would justify disinheriting Khalid, since non-Muslims do not have the right to inheritance in Islam.
While the result, disinheriting a son may be what Faisal wants, there is no doubt that he has made things with his son worse by asking the question.
The Islamic Rules of Inheritance don’t disappear because you want them to
When you have family problems, keeping with the Islamic Rules of Inheritance can be challenging. It is easy to think to yourself, “Why should I,” or “It’s my money,” or “My son does not deserve anything. Be careful here. You may be standing in a pool of your vanity. The point of the Islamic inheritance rules is that this is not about what you want or don’t want. If you are a believing Muslim, you accept the shares of succession as they are is what Allah has ordained.
So you start from the premise that, unless the problem is that this person has left Islam, they will get their rights to inheritance. Otherwise, your defining act after you are gone is willful disobedience to what the Quran requires. If you are not a believing Muslim, this is not a problem. If you are, it’s a problem.
Finding Solutions for Whom?
Depending on the particular family problem, you need to make sure your solution (1) does not violate the Islamic Rules of inheritance, (2) does exacerbate an already bad situation, and (3) does not frustrate people’s rights.
When you design a plan, you look for a solution for a problem the beneficiary either has or may have. What we don’t do, in general, is solve a problem for the person who will be dead when survivors implement this plan. Any planning consistent with Islam cannot be to massage a future dead person’s vanity.
The central part of my job as an Islamic Estate Planning Attorney is to be a counsel. Regarding Islamic Estate Planning, my goal is not just to administer whatever desires a client has- use estate planning documents to punish “bad” children and “reward” good children. We do not use “dead hand control” for its own sake (though, so some degree, we may use some level of dead hand control when appropriate).
Solutions to many challenges
It is difficult to discuss solutions to problems that may be abstract. As it happens, though, I have been writing about a wide range of challenges that Muslim families have in their estate planning for a few years now and have practiced Estate Planning for many more than that. So I have a few ideas here when it comes to adult children.
Adopted children
I wrote about adopted children in Islam recently. Particular challenges and rules are associated with adopted children, who are NOT entitled to inherit in Islam. You can see my article on adoption here.
The Surviving Spouse and the Family Home
What happens to the family home is a perenially vexing issue in Islamic Estate Planning. It comes up in the Islamic Estate Planning book I co-authored. But the idea is that people want the surviving spouse to live in the family home. The family home is also most of the family’s wealth much of the time. Overpriced housing is mainly in coastal areas, but families everywhere deal with this. So the question is, how do you do it while also making sure you are not doing an injustice to your children? Also, how do you do it when the surviving spouse is not the children’s parent? You may not be able to do it justly, but it depends. Check out the article here.
Some family members are a bad fit to be guardians for your minor children.
I have written extensively about problems that come up with guardianship for minor children. Sometimes, adult children might be guardians of minor children. Sometimes they are not suitable for this role. To read more about that, click here.
Protecting Your Home
Children and their spouses often want to co-own their parent’s homes. There may be a variety of reasons they may want to do this. I would say be careful since this can result in unintended disaster. You may have heard horror stories about adult children kicking their parents out of their homes and are convinced this can never be you. You are probably right. However, that is not the real risk when co-owning homes with children. You see, children, as they grow up, can complicate, even mess up, their lives in unpredictable ways. As you age, you want to ensure you have a place to live in dignity. The drama associated with children won’t allow this to happen.
If your adult child is helping pay the bills, repairs, a massive remodel, or paying the mortgage while living in the home, wonderful. Don’t hand over partial ownership. It it’s your home; keep it as your home. Your Islamic Estate Planning should acknowledge your debt to your adult child. That way, your child can get it back.
Let me draw this out for you as an example:
Bilal is married with two children. Buying a home near where he works is expensive. Also, he loves his parents, who are aging, and would like to stay close to them. Bilal and his wife want to add three additional bedrooms to his parent’s home. Bilal’s parents, Salma and Saleem, agree to this. They also agree that as part of a refinance, Bilal, his wife Bilquis, Salma, and Saleem will own the home together as joint tenants with the right of survivorship. In reality, they did not agree to that last part, but that is what the mortgage person told them they would do.
A few things that can go wrong here:
- Bilquis decides to leave Bilal and get a divorce, forcing a home sale.
- Bilal loses a lawsuit for sexual harassment. This forces a home sale.
- Bilquis does not get along with Salma in her old age, Bilal takes his wife’s side, and they act to move their aging parents to another location.
- Saleem dies, then Salma dies. The entirety of the home passes to Bilal. Saleem and Salma’s other heirs, including any other children, get nothing from the home. This leads to a permanent family rift.
Instead, Saleem and Salma should keep ownership of the home. If Bilal decides to put money into the home, ensure it is interest-free, not equity. He can get it all back after his parents pass away (depending on how the parent’s estate plan is set up). Bilal can also give his parents a gift.
I wrote an article about this scenario previously, and you can review it here.
There is another estate planning technique I often use for clients to protect the home that is appropriate in some contexts but not others; take a look.
Protecting children from themselves
Drafting to protect children from themselves is something I do a whole lot of- and it is tricky because Muslims have a right to inheritance. Issues can include things like special needs, substance abuse issues and a whole host of other reasons why just forking over cash to a child might be a bad idea. I have an article on protecting children from “fast money” if you are interested in using trusts to protect inheritance from internal and external threats.
You can click here to schedule a 15-minute mini-consultation with Ahmed Shaikh about your Islamic Estate Planning.