co-ownership, allowing a co-owner to demand partition. If the property itself can be divided, it is divided; otherwise, we divide its sale proceeds whenever either co-owner requests it. Completing emancipation is one instance of this, for co-ownership is sometimes ended through partition and at other times through completion.

The underlying principle is that ownership consists of the legal capacity to dispose [of the corpus of the property], analogous to physical capacity. In law, one may therefore possess the capacity to undertake one form of disposition but not another, just as this may be the case physically. This is why ownership takes various forms under the Sacred Law, just as capacity itself varies. Under full ownership, the owner may dispose of the corpus through sale or gift, and it passes from him by inheritance. He may also dispose of its benefits by lending, leasing, personal use, and other means.

Yet a man may own a Magian bondwoman or bondwomen forbidden to him because of fosterage, without having the right to sexual enjoyment of them. He may nevertheless receive compensation for such enjoyment by marrying them off—for example, by marrying a Magian bondwoman to a Magian man. He may also own a bondwoman who has borne him a child without having the right to sell or give her away; nor is she inherited from him, according to the great majority of Muslims. By consensus, however, he has the right to have intercourse with her and employ her services. Likewise, according to most of them—including Abū Hanīfa, al-Shāfiʿī, and Ahmad—compensation may be received for these benefits by marrying her off or hiring out her services.

A person also owns property pledged as security and must bear its upkeep, yet he may not undertake any disposition [with respect to it] that would extinguish the pledgee’s right, whether by sale or gift. There is a well-known disagreement concerning emancipation.

As for a slave whose emancipation has been vowed, a sacrificial animal, specific property vowed for charity, and similar property that has become due to be devoted to an act of worship, jurists from among our school and others have differed over whether the owner’s title is thereby extinguished. Both positions, however, fall outside the ordinary legal analogy of unrestricted ownership. Thus, whoever holds that his ownership has not ceased—as