positions. (The first) is Mālik’s initial position in al-Mudawwana: the legally required course is for the purchaser under the advance-payment contract to wait until the following year. If both parties willingly agree to settle the account, there are two positions. The first is that this is impermissible because it involves combining a sale with a loan; this is Mālik’s initial position in al-Mudawwana. The second is that it is permissible; this is Mālik’s later position, which he ultimately adopted. It is also Sahnūn’s position: “Whichever of the two requests a postponement is entitled to it, unless they both agree to settle the account.”
(The second position) is Ashhab’s: the legally required course is to settle the account and recover the remainder of the advance payment. If both parties agree that the purchaser should wait until another year, there are two positions. The first is that this is impermissible—Ashhab’s position—because it involves replacing one debt with another. The other is that it is permissible—Asbagh’s position—which is weak and unsupported by analogical reasoning. These, then, are four positions, each of the two aforementioned positions branching into two, as we have explained.
The fifth position is that of Ibn al-Qāsim in al-Mudawwana and Ibn al-Mawwāz’s book: the purchaser has the choice either to wait until the following year or to recover the remainder of his advance payment. This too is a weak position, open to the same objection raised against Asbagh’s position.
Fadl related in his book that the statement in al-Mudawwana, “Whichever of the two requests a postponement is entitled to it, unless they both agree to settle the account,” is Ibn al-Qāsim’s. The correct attribution, however, is to Sahnūn, as we have mentioned. For the statement, “Whichever of the two requests a postponement is entitled to it, unless they both agree to settle the account,” is incompatible with Ibn al-Qāsim’s preceding statement that, if the purchaser wishes to wait until the goods’ season the following year, he is entitled to do so. Indeed, it plainly contradicts Ibn al-Qāsim’s explicit statement in Ibn al-Mawwāz’s book that the purchaser has the choice. It is also expressly attributed to Sahnūn in some of the principal texts.
Ibn Habīb related from Mālik that the purchaser has the choice, as Ibn al-Qāsim held. He thus conflated Mālik’s two positions into a single position, distorting them both. Fadl also related from Sahnūn that both parties must be compelled to