781 – Thābit ibn al-Ḍaḥḥāk (may Allah be pleased with him) reported that “the Messenger of Allah ﷺ forbade share-cropping (muzāraʿah) and ordered leasing for hire (muʾājarah).” Muslim also transmitted it (1).

Glossary of the ḥadith
• “For hire (bi-l-muʾājarah)”: the cultivator rents the land, ploughs it, and makes use of it, then pays the owner a cash rent rather than a share of the yield.

Points derived from the ḥadith

1. Share-cropping means giving farmland to a cultivator in return for a known, undivided portion of whatever it produces, whether that portion is set aside for the owner or for the worker.
2. The ḥadith prohibits share-cropping, and a prohibition denotes that the practice is unlawful and that the contract is invalid.
3. The report establishes the permissibility of handing land over for cultivation against a fixed, known rent. Its general wording allows any form of rent, even if it is taken from the land’s own produce. This is the view of the three Imams: Abū Ḥanīfah, Aḥmad, and al-Shāfiʿī.
4. The prohibition is to be understood as referring to the defective kind of share-cropping that involves considerable ignorance, uncertainty, and injustice to one of the parties. Rāfiʿ ibn Khadīj related that, in pre-Islamic times and the early days of Islam, “people would lease land on the basis of the edges of the irrigation ponds, the heads of the channels, or specific parts of the crop; one portion would be ruined while another survived, and people had no other form of rent, so the Prophet forbade it.”
5. As for share-cropping whose terms are clear and mutually known, it was not prohibited; hence Rāfiʿ’s ḥadith states that it is permissible;