Re-thinking Waqfs: Beyond the Sacred vs. Secular Dichotomy Waqfs, civic endowments created in perpetuity, have been pillars of Islamic civilization that worked to answer the secular and mundane needs of people as well as religious ones. Given the fact that founders of a waqf could benefit from its revenues or pass them to any designated heirs, some scholars claimed that waqfs were basically used for personal interests. This paper refutes this argument through reading the waqf records from the 16th century Istanbul, in the Ayasofya Mosque district, Nahiye-i Cami'i Serif-i Ayasofya. Firstly, I argue that the waqf system, operating according to Islamic law, well understood that people would look for ways to satisfy their personal needs. This way, its mechanism linked people's personal interests with that of the public interest and widened the scope of benefits that personal properties could produce. Waqfs also planted this idea of interrelatedness of religious and profane, personal and communal in the minds of people. According to waqf records, the founders saw the relationship between the material and the spiritual, their personal interests and the public interests intertwined. A waqf founder could appoint his son as the manager of his waqf and decree some of its revenues to go to a soup kitchen. A woman could endow her waqf's benefits to herself, her husband and children, then to the poor and also require the recitation of the Qur'an each year, all decreed in the same document. Rather than using the waqf organization solely for personal gains, waqf founders made a statement that went beyond the dichotomy of personal interest versus public interest or sacred versus secular.