Waqf, wrote Marshall Hodgson, was the “material foundation” of Islamic society. These rent-yielding lands and buildings provided many of the services that the state now provides: from funding schools, mosques, hospitals, to providing bridges and water wells. Waqfs served many worldly advantages: they shielded property from seizing, fragmentation through inheritance, and possibly some taxes. Historians have used waqf documentation to better understand the political economy of places. Yet, as many studies of waqf note, waqfs were also crucially a way for founders to get closer to God. This ethical aspect of the waqf is notoriously difficult to study besides formulaic expressions found in waqf-deeds, especially in the legal and accounting documents that form the archive of historians. Using interviews and newspaper accounts of a mobilization against the expropriation of waqfs in the city center of Beirut, this presentation will highlight the way the ethical and religious fact of waqf come to matter in Muslims’ rejection of the planned expropriation. Concurrently, it demonstrates how the exemption of waqfs from expropriation reproduced the dispossession of small right-holders, like tenants, in the city-center and replacing them with the likes of Gucci. In conclusion, the paper suggests that keeping the political economic and the ethical/religious open and in tension without one over-determining the other allows us take seriously the work ethical and religious discourses do, without reducing them to their effectiveness in a fight against capitalism.