According to the school, however, his blood-money is only one thousand dirhams, because a finger entails one-tenth of the blood-money for a free person; therefore, it entails one-tenth of the blood-money for a slave, and one-tenth of a slave’s blood-money is one-tenth of his value, since the blood-money for a slave is his value.

There is no doubt that the view adopted by the author is correct. Once we have taken a slave’s value into account and treated him as an article of merchandise, then damage to merchandise is compensated according to its diminution in value, irrespective of whether its compensation is stipulated in the case of a free person or not.

An example of an injury for which no fixed compensation is stipulated is where someone wounds him in the abdomen without the wound reaching the internal cavity; this entails an assessed compensation. Or, for example, he wounds him so that his hand becomes partially impaired, without losing movement altogether. This too has no stipulated compensation. According to both the school and the view followed by the author, the compensation for such an injury is the decrease in the slave’s value after he has recovered.

His statement: “For a fetus, whether male or female, one-tenth of its mother’s blood-money is due: a ghurrah.” A fetus is the unborn child while it remains in the womb; if it is delivered dead, it is a miscarriage. The term is derived from concealment, and all words formed from the roots jīm and nūn indicate concealment. Thus, a jannah is a garden with many trees; the jinn are so called because they are concealed; and a junnah, with a ḍammah on the jīm, is that by which a person shields himself, such as a shield and the like. The word janīn is in the sense of “concealed,” because it is hidden.

Thus, if a person commits an offense against a fetus, or against its mother, and it is delivered dead, its blood-money is a ghurrah: one-tenth of its mother’s blood-money.