A soup kitchen that has fed the poor of Jerusalem's Old City for close to five centuries traces its entire legal existence to a single document: the waqfiyya Hurrem Sultan had drawn up in 1557 to fund the charitable complex she built there beginning in 1552. Hurrem, better known in the West as Roxelana, was the influential wife of Suleiman the Magnificent, and her Jerusalem foundation, a mosque, a large pilgrim hospice, an inn for travelers and the kitchen itself, needed a permanent, legally unbreakable source of income if it was to outlast her. Islamic law supplied exactly that instrument: a waqf, an endowment of specific income producing property whose revenue is dedicated forever to a stated purpose and can never be sold, inherited or redirected once the charter constituting it takes effect.
The document survives today, forty nine pages of finely finished paper carrying Suleiman's own tughra, illuminated in ink and gilding and bound in tooled leather, now held in Istanbul's Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts. What makes the charter more than a museum object is that its terms are still being honored on the ground it names: Jerusalem's Waqf administration continues to run the kitchen it funded, preparing food for distribution in the Old City much as the original document intended, which makes Hurrem Sultan's sixteenth century legal instrument one of the longest continuously executed charitable charters anywhere in the world.