are imposed upon the slave; or else it comes from the word mukātabah, the contract concluded between her and her Ansārī owners.
• Awāq: it was mentioned above that one uqiyyah equals forty Islamic dirhams, each dirham being half a mithqāl plus one-fifth, and a mithqāl weighs 4.25 grams.
• Awāq is the plural of uqiyyah. Its original form is awāqī with a doubled yāʾ; one of the two yāʾs was dropped for ease of pronunciation and the other by the same rule that applies to qāḍin (“judge”).
• “Your walāʾ is mine”: that is, the allegiance that results from your emancipation belongs to me.
• “Mā bāl…?” (What is the matter…?): it serves as the response to ammā; in principle it would be linked by the particle fa, which may be omitted. The word bāl means “condition” or “affair” of the men in question.
• “Men”: the Prophet ﷺ used the term to indicate that the bargaining had been conducted with men. In some narrations of al-Bukhārī the wording is “What is the matter with some people (aqwām)?” and in others “with some folk (anās).”
• “Are not in the Book of Allah”: i.e., those conditions are not part of Allah’s ruling set forth in His Book and the Sunnah of His Messenger ﷺ; rather, they conflict with the Qur’an, the Sunnah, and consensus.
• “Mā kāna…”: here mā is a conditional particle, hence the response is introduced by the fa in “fa-huwa bāṭil” (then it is null and void).
• Bāṭil: linguistically it means wasted, of no effect; in legal usage it denotes something invalid from the outset and therefore without legal force.
• “Even if there were a hundred conditions”: the number one hundred is for emphasis and rhetorical force, meaning that any unlegislated conditions are void, no matter how many they may be.
• “Aḥaqqu wa awthaq”: although cast in the comparative form, they function here as emphatic adjectives, meaning that Allah’s ruling and Allah’s condition are the truly firm ones.
• Awthaq: the verb wathiqa, yathiqu, wathāqatan means “to be strong and well-established”; thus the sense here is “firmer and more securely binding.”