Living Together: Ancient Solutions For Modern Problems In Public Service Sustainability With Ottoman Cash Waqfs

Human beings are social beings by nature, living within and with society. The ontological rationale of society is public services. Public services are both the cause and the result of people living together. One of the few things that have continued to exist with the human species from the earliest times to the present day is public services. This phenomenon may indicate the strong necessity and high adaptability of public services. Throughout the historical process, humanity has applied many models to produce public services, and in today's modern material civilization, public services are produced by the Nation State, and the cost of these services is covered by taxes collected from society. In this study, while the sustainability of the methods used by nation states to finance public services is being discussed, a critical perspective on the sustainability paradigm is also presented. The discussion highlights the necessity of developing public service financing methods that do not require sustainability and proposes the waqf paradigm as an alternative suggestion. The proposal is concretized with examples from the Ottoman period Rumelian cash waqfs.