Abstract

This paper seeks to link conservation of historic buildings with a tradition of Islamic waqf Its aim is to inspire useful conservation lessons from this tradition for possible use in modern day practice The paper investigates traditional waqf practice in the World Heritage Stone Town of Zanzibar to discover how it managed to preserve substantial stock of its historic buildings throughout the times The results of this paper show that although waqf wasoriginally intended for socio-economic welfare of poor and disadvantaged it is inherently coded with simple but effective heritage conservation philosophies The philosophies pre-date the world conservation movements and can be adopted to enrich the present concepts