Full brothers left with nothing asked the caliph Umar to treat their father as a donkey, and he changed his ruling

The case is called al-mushtaraka (the shared case), al-himariyya (the donkey case) or al-umariyya. A woman died leaving a husband, a mother, maternal half-brothers and full brothers. The Koran's fixed shares give the husband half, the mother a sixth and the maternal siblings a third. Those shares use up the estate. The full brothers inherit only what is left, so they get nothing, though they are related to the dead woman through both parents. Reports collected in al-Hakim's Mustadrak say Umar ruled both ways. The full brothers argued, in the version that gives the case its name, that even if their father had been a donkey they were still sons of the same mother. Umar then let the full and maternal brothers share the third. When a man objected that Umar had not done so in an earlier year, Umar replied that the earlier ruling was what they decided then and this one was what they decide now. Uthman and Zayd ibn Thabit shared the third. Ali, Ibn Masud and Ibn Abbas did not. The Maliki and Shafii schools follow the sharing view. The Hanafi and Hanbali schools give the full brothers nothing. The schools still differ, and a modern answer calls it a dispute over how to read the texts, not a rejection of them.