How a place becomes a mosque

Question

About forty years ago a man built a mosque, told people to pray in it and made it a waqf orally. Now his granddaughter (his son’s daughter) is preventing people from building a wall and the like within the mosque enclosure, which has led people to think that this mosque was never made a waqf at all; rather, she is breaking this oral waqf. The worshippers of the mosque are of the view that when a waqf is not made in writing on paper, the waqf is not valid.

Answer

If he built the mosque, made it a waqf orally and gave people permission to pray in it, and the adhan and congregational prayer began to be held there, and he set this mosque apart from his own property — by a pathway and the like — then it has become a mosque in the Sharʿi sense by unanimous agreement, even if matters never reached the point of drawing up a written waqf deed.

Source: Fatawa Mahmudiyya

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