Paper short abstract

This paper draws on waqf (Islamic endowment) and ethics of trusteeship to develop archiving methods that balance ethics and sustainable impact within European secular academia. I address gaps in open science and universal legal frameworks through fieldwork with nazers (trustees) in Saudi Arabia.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores waqf [Islamic endowment] and ownership ethics of trusteeship to balance ethical conduct and sustainable academic outcomes from archiving within a secular academic infrastructure in Europe. I do so to situate my ethical practice in relation to my positionality and my Muslim participants, and to address gaps in the FAIR principles and open science that promote sustainable and impactful epistemological contribution through data access and reuse without sufficient ethical consideration. I develop methodologies to move beyond universalised legal guidelines applied to students and research communities with different cosmologies, such as the GDPR’s contradiction with the Islamic understanding of the continuity of personhood after death. Drawing on waqf’s inclusivity and its role in enabling knowledge to endure in the medieval Islamic world, grounded in a relation to the physical world as an amanah [trust] with a divine presence, I engage a concept of sustainability linked to an Islamic cosmology of posthumous continuity. I adopt this trusteeship paradigm to challenge contemporary possessive ‘data ideology’ that stands in the way of the inclusive access promoted in open science.

While the dead endower in Islam retains agency through continued world-making in waqf, I draw a parallel with archiving as a form of sustainable knowledge-making by the deceased researcher. Based on fieldwork with Saudi Arabian waqf nazers [trustees] and other experts, I develop procedures for securing long-term consent for ethical reuse beyond the lifetimes of informants. I draw on waqf practices to protect collections from ethical gaps in existing legal frameworks.