need such benefits and providing them causes the owner no appreciable harm, then he is obliged to grant them and it is unlawful for him to withhold them, by analogy with the case just discussed.
Disagreement among the scholars
The scholars unanimously agree that it is impermissible to rest beams on a neighbor’s wall when doing so would cause him harm, unless he gives permission, because the Prophet ﷺ said, “There must be neither harm nor reciprocation of harm.”
They differed, however, when no harm would befall the owner of the wall and the owner of the beams needed to place them there—such as when he cannot roof his building except by using the neighbor’s wall.
The three Imams held that it is not permissible, basing themselves on the general principle of prohibition and citing proofs such as the hadith, “The property of a Muslim is not lawful except with his willing consent,” and the hadith, “Your wealth is sacred among you” (Muslim 1218), along with other evidences.
Imam Ahmad, Ishaq, and the scholars of hadith, on the other hand, maintained that the wall must be offered to the neighbor who needs it when his need is genuine and the harm to the owner is slight, and that the judge must compel the owner to comply, at the request of the neighbor with the beams, if he refuses.
Their evidence:
- The plain wording of the hadith before us: it comes in the form of an emphatic prohibition, and prohibition indicates that the act is unlawful; once withholding is unlawful, granting becomes obligatory.
- Abu Hurayrah, the narrator of the hadith, denounced those who neglected this sunnah and threatened them for abandoning it. This shows that he understood providing the benefit to be obligatory and refusing it to be forbidden, and the narrator of a hadith best knows its meaning.
- A comparable incident occurred in the time of ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab: Mālik relates with a sound chain that al-Daḥḥāk ibn Khalīfah asked Muḥammad ibn Maslamah to run a canal for him in