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The sale of ʿarāyā for their estimated equivalent, payable at harvest, is exempted by concession from the prohibition of muzābanah and all other forms of usury, for two reasons.

The first is to avert the harm caused to the donor by the recipient’s continued possession of the donated fruit. People used to support one another: someone who owned date palms would give someone who owned none the fruit of one or several of his trees. The recipient’s entering the orchard to gather and tend his donated fruit would burden the donor, preventing him from enjoying privacy in his orchard with his wife and children, as was their custom. This hardship might deter him from making such a donation another year.

The second reason is to promote kindness and consideration rather than hard bargaining. If the recipient needed to guard his donated fruit, gather what fell from it, and tend it, the trouble involved could exceed its value, leaving him unable to benefit from the gift. The recipient therefore needed someone to relieve him of the burden of tending his donated fruit, just as the donor needed privacy in his orchard. For this reason, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ permitted the fruit that the donor had given away to be assessed against him by estimation, so that he would owe its estimated equivalent in dates at harvest, provided both parties consented and agreed to this.

Section

The sale of an ʿariyyah back to its donor for its estimated equivalent is not, strictly speaking, a sale. Rather, it is a further act of kindness following his initial kindness, through which he also averts harm to himself by undertaking to provide the recipient with the estimated equivalent of the donated fruit at harvest. This is comparable to assessing against him, by estimation, the zakat due to its rightful recipients, because of the harm that their sharing the orchard with him would cause.

The permissibility of taking back an ʿariyyah for its estimated equivalent may be established by analogy with the estimation of zakat as follows: this is a matter for which the Law has set a limit of five wasqs. Its fruit may therefore be estimated on condition that he delivers, at harvest, a measured quantity of dried dates corresponding to that estimate. The precedent for this is zakat. It was only called