His statement, “the purchaser may recover from the seller,” means that the purchaser may recover from the seller the full price he paid him. The evidence is the Prophet’s ﷺ statement: “If you sell fruit to your brother and it is struck by a natural calamity, it is not lawful for you to take anything from him. How can you take your brother’s wealth without right?” (1) It is also established from him ﷺ that he ordered that losses caused by natural calamities be remitted (2). The first wording is more detailed: “If you sell fruit to your brother and it is struck by a natural calamity, it is not lawful for you to take anything from him. How can you take your brother’s wealth without right?”

If the seller says, “How can I be liable for it when it now belongs to the purchaser?”

We say: Because your sale of it entails your undertaking to preserve and tend it until the time of harvesting arrives. It is therefore under your care now, even though the purchaser owns it and may harvest it or sell it. Yet you remain liable for it, because you are the one required to preserve it until the time of harvesting.

Excluded from this is the case where the purchaser delays harvesting it beyond the customary time; in that case, liability rests with him, not the seller. Thus, if the purchaser negligently delays harvesting it at harvest time until rain comes and ruins it, may he recover from the seller? He may not, because he was himself negligent. If the purchaser says, “I have vehicles to harvest the date palms and transport the crop, but the vehicles have not arrived,” and he leaves it until the harvest season has passed and it is destroyed by a natural calamity, then he may not recover anything from the seller, because this negligence was on the part of the purchaser himself.