In the fifteenth maqāma of al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmat, the trickster figure Abū Zayd is presented with a complicated inheritance riddle, written on a piece of paper in verse. The riddle posits a breakdown of inheritance in which a dead man’s brother receives no inheritance while his brother in law receives a portion. The solution entails configuring an unusual familial structure, and when Abū Zayd claims to know the answer, he also demands dinner as payment. This kind of inheritance riddle is a feature of both the adab tradition, in which characters both real and imaginary solve complex puzzles, and the fiqh tradition. They are also commonly versified. This paper explores this phenomenon across adab and fiqh to show how these discourses cross-pollinate to produce new ways of discussing law and inheritance.