Four entities, one property
Four distinct entities stand on a single property, with separate accounts and incompatible offices. The separation is the guarantee of all parties.
The separation is the guarantee of all parties, and it must be written before anyone arrives. Four distinct legal entities stand on a single property, with separate accounts and offices incompatible with one another.
1. The House. The association of the members, with statutes, rules of the workshop and of common life, admission on application and an arbitration clause. It does not own the property outright: the buildings are bound to their purpose and are not sold except unanimously.
2. The farm. A cooperative whose working members are the members of the House. It keeps the buildings in agricultural use, supplies the table, binds the apprentices to a season and a harvest, and sells the surplus, assigning the proceeds to the House, like any agricultural cooperative.
3. Al-Munya is the body, and the company that holds it. Inside: Dar al-Asl, where the guests of the house lodge without charge (costs on the company); and Dar al-Diyafa, where the nudamāʾ and their guests lodge and pay their share (proceeds to the company). Al-Munya pays the House a fixed annual sum, never a percentage of revenue; in Sicily it is Dar al-Diyafa, carried by a separate vehicle with its own investors, that pays it to Al-Funduq.
4. An-Nudama. The ninety-nine founders. A distinct body, with a fund of its own, which finances the House. It is not a house. Membership confers no entitlement to admission to the House, nor access to common life, nor a voice in the deliberations.
Why four and not one
A single entity holding together school, farm, hospitality and fundraising would be simpler to set up and far more fragile. The separation serves three purposes: it prevents paid hospitality from conditioning the life of the members; it prevents financial support from turning into power over the bodies; and it allows each activity to be financed by its own investors without weighing on the others.
Those who support do not govern
The resolutions of the assembly are not subject to approval, veto or reform by those who fund or support, and to none of them are reserved powers of appointment or voting rights: the clause is set out in full on the page The government of the house.
Whoever funds buys one thing only, and it is the thing worth funding: that the house exists and works. He does not buy a voice in how it is governed, because a house ruled by those who pay for it is not the institution this project takes up — it is the one in which the institution went wrong.
The words of this page are in the common glossary; the works cited in the sources; the sister house is Riyāḍ al-Uns.