most scholars of our school may hold—it is a form of ownership that may be directed only to the designated purpose, whether emancipation, ritual sacrifice, or charity. It is analogous to a slave purchased on condition that he be emancipated, given in charity, or bestowed as a benefaction, or to an expiatory animal purchased on condition that it be sent as an offering to the Sacred Precinct. Whoever holds that the owner’s title has ceased nevertheless maintains that he is the one empowered to emancipate the slave, send the animal as an offering, or give the property in charity. This, too, departs from the ordinary legal analogy governing the extinction of ownership in other cases.

The same applies to the jurists’ disagreement concerning an endowment for a specified beneficiary: Does the endowed property become the property of Allah, pass to the beneficiary, or remain the property of the endower? There are three positions on this in the school of Ahmad and elsewhere.

On any view, the form of ownership described here differs from other forms of ownership with respect to sale or gift. Likewise, a donee’s ownership, when the donor may revoke the gift—such as when a father gives something to his son, according to hadith jurists such as al-Shāfiʿī and Ahmad—is unlike other forms of ownership, since someone other than the owner has been empowered to take the property back from him and rescind the transaction.

Analogous to this are all forms of ownership arising from a contract that either contracting party may rescind. Examples include property sold subject to an option, according to those who hold that it passes to the purchaser—as do al-Shāfiʿī and Ahmad in one opinion reported from each of them—and property sold to a purchaser who subsequently becomes insolvent before paying the price, according to the hadith jurists and the people of the Hijaz. Another example, according to all Muslims, is sold property in which a defect or the absence of an agreed characteristic is discovered. Thus, in commutative and gratuitous transactions, a contracting party may recover the property, whereas a father’s property is not subject to recovery; both nevertheless fall within the general category of ownership. The same applies to a son’s ownership according to the school of Ahmad and other hadith jurists, who in this matter followed the import of the Book and the explicit wording of the sunnah.

Some of the early Muslims hold that it is freely available to the father while remaining the son’s property,