There is also a divergence of transmission from Mālik on a further point: is the warranty binding in every land even when its inhabitants have not previously been required to adopt it? Two opposite positions are related from him. If one says that the people of a given town are not bound by it unless they have first been made to observe it, a new question arises: must the inhabitants of every land be so compelled or not? The Mālikī school records two opinions on this issue.
Cash payment is not compulsory during the three-day warranty, even if it is expressly stipulated, whereas it is compulsory during the one-year warranty. The rationale is that, in the latter, delivery of the sale to the seller is deemed complete—by analogy with a sale that is subject to an option—because the cash involved vacillates between the rules of an advance payment (salaf) and those of a straightforward sale.
All the foregoing are the well-known rulings on warranties in the Mālikī madhhab; they are secondary questions built upon the assumption that the doctrine itself is valid. Let us therefore return to setting out the proofs of those who affirm it and those who reject it.
Mālik’s principal reliance—may God have mercy on him—in affirming the warranty was the practice of the people of Medina. His later followers supported this with the report transmitted by al-Ḥasan from ʿUqbah ibn ʿĀmir, in which the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said:
“The warranty for slaves is three days.”
Another wording states:
“There is no warranty after four.”
Al-Ḥasan also reported this ḥadīth from Samurah ibn Jundub al-Fazārī, may God be pleased with him. Both narrations, however, are judged defective by the experts, for they disagreed as to whether al-Ḥasan actually heard from Samurah, even though al-Tirmidhī declared the ḥadīth sound.
As for the other jurists of the provinces, no authentic trace of a warranty reached them, and they held that, even were such a report sound, it would contradict established legal principles. The Muslims are unanimously agreed that any calamity befalling the object of sale before possession is taken is borne by the buyer; to carve out an exception to so settled a principle would require an incontrovertible transmission. For this reason one of the two reports from Mālik weakens the view that the warranty should be applied in every land unless it has become local custom or is expressly stipulated—this applies all the more to the one-year warranty, for which no text has been transmitted.
It is further related from al-Shāfiʿī, on the authority of Ibn Jurayj, that he said: I asked Ibn Shihāb about the one-year warranty and the three-day warranty, and he replied, “I know of no precedent for either.”
Having clarified the distinction between defects that entail a legal ruling and those that do not, and having established the condition that the defect must have existed prior to the sale—or, for those who recognise it, within the warranty period—let us proceed to the remaining matters.