A father favouring his son over his daughter when dividing his property
5-11-2009 | IslamWeb
Question:
Dear Sir, I have a daughter and son both married, my son in law has prosperous established business. My son is living with me in the same house. he is also a working partner in my business, in fact he devote more time and effort in managing the business affairs. Now I intend to distribute my belongings to the them in my life time Is it possible that i can give more funds and property to my son with the approval of my daughter.
Answer:
All perfect praise be to Allaah, The Lord of the Worlds. I testify that there is none worthy of worship except Allaah, and that Muhammad 
is His slave and Messenger.
A father is religiously required to be just between his sons and daughters when gifting them as Allaah Says (what means): {Indeed, Allaah orders justice and good conduct.}[Quran 16:90] Moreover, the Prophet said: "Fear Allaah and be just between your children (when gifting them)…"
However, the jurists 
differed in opinion about the method of achieving justice in this context, some of them stated that justice is achieved by gifting the son twice the share of a female exactly like the case of inheritance. ‘Ataa’ 
said: "They used to divide according to the Book of Allaah only”. So, giving the male more than the female according to this statement is not contrary to justice that is enjoined provided that it does not exceed a double (of the share of the female).
However, some other jurists are of the view that justice is achieved by giving an equal amount to each one of them, meaning that one should give the female the same amount that he gives to the male as per the Prophetic narration which reads: “Be just between your children (when gifting them) because if I were to favor someone I would have favored women…" This is the view we adopt here in Islamweb.
According to this view, you should not favor your son over your daughter when gifting them, and according to the first opinion –which is stated by a group of prominent scholars, like Ibn Al-Qayyim and Ibn ‘Uthaymeen and others it is permissible for you to gift your son more than your daughter provided that this favoring is not more than a double. If the favoring is larger than this, then it is not permissible in our view even if the daughter agrees to it because the Prophet prevented the father of An-Nou’maan (Ibn Basheer 
) from favoring one of his children over others and he did not ask him whether or not the rest of his children agreed to it. So, this proves that favoring is absolutely forbidden, because the daughter may agree out of shyness in front of you while she is not pleased in her own self. In this case, problems and the cutting of kinship would occur between her and her brother after your death.
However, what is mentioned above is in regard to the case if you favored your son without any sound reason, but if you want to give him in order to favour him because you see that he deserves that due to the time and effort that he devoted in order to develop your business, then this is permissible because if you take him as a hired person in this work, you should determine for him a salary that is equivalent to the salary of a person who does the same job like him.