The other transactions are benevolent ones, such as loans, loans for use, gifts, and bequests. Since transactions founded on justice consist either of exchange or partnership, it is indisputably clear that orchard-tending and sharecropping arrangements, and their like, belong to the category of partnership, not pure exchange. A sale involving uncertainty is prohibited only in exchanges because it amounts to consuming wealth unjustly. Here, neither party consumes the wealth of the other. If the crop does not grow, the landowner [has not obtained] the other party’s benefit, for he neither received it nor acquired it under the contract, nor was it what he sought. Rather, the benefit of the worker’s labor has gone to waste, just as the benefit of the landowner’s land has gone to waste. The landowner has obtained nothing that could be said to have been taken, and the other party has taken nothing. This differs from sales and leases involving uncertainty, in which one party receives something while the other remains exposed to risk, leading one of them to regret and both of them to dispute. This danger is absent from these partnerships, which are founded on pure equity and contain absolutely no injustice, whether through uncertainty or otherwise.

Anyone who reflects on this will discern the basis of these principles and recognize that permitting these arrangements is more consistent with the foundations of Islamic law, more readily acknowledged by reason, and further removed from every objection than permitting leases of land—indeed, than permitting many of the sales and leases whose lawfulness is unanimously accepted. Such arrangements are purely beneficial to people and entail no harm. Our fellow jurists who prohibited them were led into confusion only by the strained conclusion they drew from the transmitted reports: they regarded the arrangement as hiring someone to perform unspecified work because it involves work for compensation. Yet not everyone who works in order to benefit from his work is thereby a hired worker. Examples include the work of two partners on jointly owned property and the work of two partners in a partnership of