Back to search

How do the children of the paternal aunt and the children of the maternal aunt alone inherit from a deceased woman, and is the inheritance of the children of the maternal aunt equally divided, or is it "to the male, twice the share of the female"?

1 min readAlso available in العربية

The view of the majority of scholars regarding the inheritance of relatives by affinity (dhawu al-arham) is the principle of substitution (tanzil). Thus, the paternal aunt (ammah) is substituted for the father, and the maternal aunt (khalah) is substituted for the mother, and their children are substituted for their mothers. The inheritance is then divided as if the deceased died leaving a father and a mother. The mother receives one-third and the father receives two-thirds. So, the children of the paternal aunt take two-thirds because she is in the position of the father, and the children of the maternal aunt take one-third because she is in the position of the mother.

As for how the inheritance is divided among the children of the paternal and maternal aunts, according to the majority, the male receives the share of two females, unless the paternal or maternal aunt was a uterine sibling (from the mother's side only), in which case the wealth is divided equally between male and female.

Summarized from the full answer at Ftawy · reviewed Sep 2, 2026

Read the full answer on Ftawy