zakāt is owed on any grain apart from wheat and barley, and no zakāt is owed on any fruit apart from date-palms and grape-vines, because the Messenger of Allah ﷺ named none but these. A number of Companions and Successors held the same view, and it was later adopted by Ibn Abī Laylā and Sufyān. When the Messenger of Allah ﷺ singled out these four kinds for the obligatory charity and ignored everything else, he certainly knew that people possessed other forms of wealth and other staples that the earth produces. His deliberate omission was therefore an act of exemption, just as he exempted horses and slaves from zakāt.

I say: This last argument applies equally to trade goods. They were well known in the Prophet’s time and are mentioned repeatedly in the Quran and hadiths on various occasions. Yet his silence ﷺ about them and his failure to stipulate any zakāt—despite the fact that some later scholars maintained it was due on them—constitutes another deliberate exemption, for a profound wisdom to which I have already drawn attention as far as has become clear to us. Allah, Mighty and Exalted, knows best.

Under the heading “Determining the niṣāb for date-palms” he cites the Prophet ﷺ as saying: “When you appraise the crop, take (something) and leave one third….”

I say: The isnād is weak; it contains a narrator who is unknown to al-Dhahabī and others. No credence should be given to the authentication offered by the two scholars the author mentions, for both are overly lenient. A sufficient indication of this is that al-Tirmidhī—despite his well-known leniency—when he recorded the ḥadith, remained silent about it and did not grade it as good. For that reason I have listed it in al-Ḍaʿīfah 2556 and Ḍaʿīf Abī Dāwūd 281.

The report the author then cites from Bashīr ibn Yasār, in which he said, “ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb dispatched…,” was narrated by Abū ʿUbayd in al-Amwāl 486/1449 and by Ibn Abī Shaybah 3/194 with a chain whose transmitters are trustworthy; nonetheless, it is interrupted between Bashīr and ʿUmar, for the authorities record him transmitting only from lesser Companions such as Anas and others.