Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm Āl al-Shaykh and Shaykh ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Bāz—may Allah have mercy on them.

10 – Shaykh ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Saʿdī said: A son who works in his father’s business may occupy a lofty position: he devotes himself to serving his father and handling his affairs, seeking Allah’s reward and showing kindness to his father and his siblings. He may also take another course that is blameless: he may conclude an employment contract with his father, in which case he is like any hired worker.

Shaykh Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm said: If the son works alongside his father and the father pays him wages for that work, I see no objection; this is not preferential gifting but a wage contract.

11 – Al-Muwaffaq, Shaykh Taqī al-Dīn, and others said: A person is not obliged to treat his relatives equally in gifts, nor to give them according to their prospective inheritance shares, for the default rule is that one is free to dispose of his wealth as he wishes, and they cannot be analogised to one’s children.

Al-Ḥārithī said: This was the view of the early scholars, whereas the well-known position among the later scholars is that they must be given according to their inheritance shares, by drawing an analogy between lifetime gifts and post-death inheritance. The first view is the stronger.

Scholarly disagreement:
The scholars are unanimously agreed on the legitimacy of fairness and equal treatment among children in gifts, yet they differed on whether such equality is obligatory.

Aḥmad, al-Bukhārī, Isḥāq, al-Thawrī, and a number of others held that it is obligatory, and that favouring some children over others or singling any of them out is forbidden, based on the explicit wording of the ḥadith.

The majority maintained that equality is recommended but not obligatory; they offered lengthy excuses for departing from the ḥadith, none of which are convincing.

The incontestable truth is that equality among them is obligatory, in deference to the clear wording of the ḥadith and because of what it entails.