and comparable foodstuffs; in his view, the owner is not given this choice in such cases, because it would involve usury. Such an alteration is deemed to preclude restitution, and the person who seized the property must provide its equivalent, or its value if it has no equivalent.
As for the second category—where the person who seized the property has contributed nothing but labor to the alterations he made—it falls into two cases:
The first is where the work is minor and does not change the name by which the property is known, such as sewing or mending a garment, and similar work.
The second is where the work is substantial and transforms the seized property into something bearing a different name, such as making a chest or doors from a piece of timber, grinding wheat, weaving yarn, fashioning silver into jewelry or minting it into dirhams, and similar work.
In the first case, the person who seized the property has no claim for his work, and the owner takes back the property with the work done on it.
In the second case, the transformation precludes restitution, and the person who seized the property must pay its value on the day he seized it, or provide its equivalent if it has one. This is the substance of Ibn al-Qāsim’s position on this category.
Ashhab takes the case of building as his governing principle in all these matters. He holds that the person who seized the property has no claim for anything he cannot take away, whether dyeing, mending, weaving, tanning, grinding, making a chest or doors from timber, or similar work. It has also been reported from Ibn al-Qāsim that dyeing precludes restitution and obliges the person who seized the property to pay its value on the day of seizure; the owner is not entitled to pay him the value of the dye and take back the cloth. The same applies to alterations comparable to dyeing.
Another view holds that the two become joint owners, in proportion to the respective values of the dye and the cloth, if the owner of the cloth refuses to pay the value of the dye and the person who seized it refuses to pay the value of the cloth. He rejected this view in the Book of Lost Property in al-Mudawwana, stating that joint ownership arises only where there is some semblance of a rightful claim.