exchanging dates for dates is ribā unless it is done hand to hand; and exchanging barley for barley is ribā unless it is done hand to hand.” He thus distinguished wheat from barley by placing the conjunction “and” between them, just as he distinguished wheat from dates.
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The view held by Mālik and all his followers is that wheat and barley constitute a single kind, in accordance with what he narrated in his Muwattaʾ from Saʿd ibn Abī Waqqās and Muʿayqīb al-Dawsī. For the wording in the hadith of ʿUbāda ibn al-Sāmit, “Exchange wheat for barley in whatever quantities you wish,” is an addition not agreed upon by all its narrators. It may therefore have been a statement by the narrator, based on an analogy with the Prophet’s ﷺ words: “When the two kinds differ, exchange them in whatever quantities you wish, with immediate delivery.”
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Mālik—may Allah have mercy on him—extended the ruling by analogy from the wheat and barley mentioned in the hadith to all comparable grains and storable staple foods. By analogy with dates, he included comparable storable foods eaten on some occasions as delicacies and on others as sustenance, such as raisins, walnuts, almonds, and the like. By analogy with the salt mentioned in the hadith, he included comparable foods stored for seasoning staple foods, such as spices, onions, garlic, and the like.
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As for gold and silver, he did not extend their ruling by analogy to any goods sold by measure or weight. This is because, in his view, the legal cause for prohibiting unequal exchanges within either of these two commodities is that they serve as payment for goods and compensation for destroyed property. This legal cause is confined to them and does not extend to anything else. Likewise, al-Shāfiʿī did not extend the ruling for gold and silver by analogy to any goods sold by measure or weight. He did, however, extend the ruling for wheat, barley, dates, and salt by analogy to all food, whether or not it was storable or a staple, because he considered the legal cause for