675 – Ibn ʿUmar (may Allah be pleased with them) reported that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ “forbade the sale of walāʾ and its transfer as a gift.” Agreed upon. (1)

Lexical Notes

• al-walāʾ (with the wāw vocalised with fatḥa and an extended vowel): in ordinary Arabic it means authority and support. Here it refers to the walāʾ of manumission, which arises from the benefaction of the emancipator toward the person he has set free. It is a bond like that of blood-kin: it can neither be sold nor inherited in itself, although inheritance takes place by reason of it. The word luḥma (with ḍamma) means kinship.

Points Derived from the Ḥadith

1. Walāʾ is an agnatic bond established by the emancipator’s favour in setting his slave free. While enslaved, the person was virtually non-existent—owning nothing and able to dispose of nothing. When his master emancipated him, he brought him into full legal existence, just as a father is the cause of his child’s coming into being; the master therefore possesses the merit of emancipation.

2. Because of this bond the emancipator—male or female—inherits from the freed person, and so do his agnatic relatives who inherit in their own right, provided the freed person has no blood-kin entitled to inherit.

3. Al-Ḥākim and Ibn Ḥibbān relate that the Prophet ﷺ said: “Walāʾ is a bond like the bond of kinship; it is neither sold nor given away.” Like lineage, it cannot be annulled. For that reason its sale, or the transfer of ownership in any form, is inconceivable, for it is akin to the bond of blood concerning which the Prophet ﷺ said, “Allah has cursed the one who claims descent from anyone other than his father.”

4. The prohibition stated in the ḥadith denotes unlawfulness and entails the invalidity of the transaction it forbids, so