or from the legally prescribed moral character—any deficiency in which reduces the price of what is sold. The assessment of such a deficiency varies with time, custom, and the people concerned; what is reckoned a flaw in one period may, under the Law, be deemed a virtue in another—for example, female circumcision in bond-women and circumcision in male slaves.

Because these considerations overlap in goods that people trade, the jurists have disagreed about a number of cases. We shall mention the most famous points of contention so that the practitioner may have, in his own mind, a kind of code or constitution to follow whenever he finds no explicit statement from earlier authorities or fails to locate a text transmitted from anyone else.

One of these issues is sexual misconduct (zinā) on the part of slaves. The scholars differed: Mālik and al-Shāfiʿī regarded it as a defect, whereas Abū Ḥanīfah did not—even though it is certainly a shortcoming in the legally mandated virtue of chastity.

Marriage, in Mālik’s view, is likewise a defect, for it prevents full use of the slave; the same applies to outstanding debt. In general, a defect is anything that hinders the action of the person or of the body, and that hindrance may be intrinsic or external. Al-Shāfiʿī, however, said: “To the best of my knowledge, neither debt nor marriage constitutes a defect.”

Pregnancy in a high-grade (rāʾiʿah) female slave is a defect according to Mālik; within the school there is disagreement about whether it counts as a defect in an ordinary (wakhsh) slave.

The practice of tasriyah—retaining the milk in an animal’s udder for several days so as to suggest abundant yield—is, in the view of Mālik and al-Shāfiʿī, a defect. Their proof is the well-known ḥadīth of the muṣarrāh in which the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said:
“Do not bind the udders of camels and cattle. Whoever does so has two options: if he wishes, he may keep the animal, and if he wishes, he may return it along with a sâʿ of dates.”
They argue that the ḥadīth grants the buyer the option of returning the animal, which shows that tasriyah is a consequential defect. They add that it is a form of deceit (tadlīs) and therefore falls under the general heading of other deceptive defects.

Abū Ḥanīfah and his colleagues, by contrast, hold that tasriyah is not a defect, citing the consensus that if a man buys a ewe whose milk later proves scant, that in itself is no ground for complaint. They further maintain that the ḥadīth of the muṣarrāh cannot establish a binding rule because it contradicts foundational principles in several respects:

1. It clashes with the agreed-upon maxim, “Profit follows liability.”
2. It conflicts with the unanimous prohibition on selling food for food on deferred terms.
3. In matters of damage, compensation is either by value or by equivalent, whereas a sâʿ of dates is neither the value nor the equivalent of the milk.
4. It amounts to selling an unknown quantity of food (bulk) for a known measure, for the milk with which the seller deceived the buyer is of indeterminate amount, liable to be little or much, while the consideration here is fixed.

Nevertheless, they concede that this case must be singled out as an exception to all those principles, owing to the soundness of the ḥadīth. It thus stands as a special ruling rather than an example of the general category under discussion.