There is, moreover, no sound basis for those who impose zakāh on an endowment meant for the poor, because two considerations converge in that case: first, the ownership is incomplete; and second, the burden would fall upon an unspecified group drawn from among the very people who are eligible to receive alms, not from among those upon whom zakāh is owed.
As for the second question—namely, leased land: upon whom is the zakāh of what it yields due? One group held that the zakāh is owed by the cultivator, and this was the position of Mālik, al-Shāfiʿī, al-Thawrī, Ibn al-Mubārak, Abū Thawr, and others. Abū Ḥanīfah and his companions, by contrast, maintained that the zakāh is owed by the landowner; the tenant owes nothing.
The root of their disagreement is whether the ʿushr is a right attached to the land, to the crop, or to both together. No one explicitly said it belongs to both, although in reality it concerns them jointly. Because each side assumed that it must pertain exclusively to one of the two, they then differed over which of them it ought more properly to be ascribed to in the standard case where both land and crop are owned by a single person. The majority assigned it to the item on which zakāh is actually levied, namely the grain, whereas Abū Ḥanīfah assigned it to the factor that gives rise to the obligation, namely the land.
They likewise differed about kharāj land that passes into Muslim ownership: is ʿushr levied on it in addition to kharāj or not? The majority held that ʿushr—i.e., zakāh—is taken, while Abū Ḥanīfah and his colleagues said that no ʿushr is due.
The reason for their divergence, as already noted, is whether zakāh is a right of the land or of the grain. If it is a right of the land, two dues—ʿushr and kharāj—cannot converge upon it. If it is a right of the grain, then kharāj remains the land’s due and zakāh the grain’s due. This controversy arises because the ownership involved is defective, and for that same reason the jurists disagreed about the permissibility of selling kharāj land.
When ʿushr land passes into the hands of a dhimmī who cultivates it, the majority say that nothing at all is due. Nuʿmān (Abū Ḥanīfah), however, said that when a dhimmī purchases ʿushr land it turns into kharāj land. He evidently regarded ʿushr as the right attached to land owned by Muslims, and kharāj as the right attached to land owned by dhimmīs. On that principle, however, kharāj land that later passes to Muslims ought likewise to revert to ʿushr land, just as in his view ʿushr land becomes kharāj land when acquired by a dhimmī.
There are also issues connected to the owner that properly belong to this chapter: first, if a person sets aside the zakāh and it is lost; and second, if payment was possible but part of the wealth was destroyed before the zakāh was disbursed.