They imagine that the more learned jurist is simply the one who has memorized the greatest number of rulings. Such people are like someone who thinks a cobbler is defined by the quantity of shoes he owns, not by his ability to make them. It is self-evident that a man who merely possesses many shoes will eventually meet someone whose foot fits none of them, and he will be forced, perforce, to turn to the craftsman who can fashion a shoe suitable for every foot. This, in truth, is the situation of most putative students of law in our day.
Now that we have digressed, let us return to the matters we promised to discuss.
The First Question
The scholars are unanimously agreed that selling gold for gold or silver for silver is lawful only when the exchange is equal for equal and hand-to-hand. The lone exception is the view reported from Ibn ʿAbbās and those Meccans who followed him; they permitted disparity but still prohibited deferment.
Ibn ʿAbbās adopted this position on the strength of what he narrated from Usāmah ibn Zayd, from the Prophet—may God bless him and grant him peace—who said:
“Usury exists only in deferred transactions.”
The report is sound, and Ibn ʿAbbās took it at its outward meaning, confining ribā to cases of deferment alone.
The majority, however, followed what Mālik transmitted from Nāfiʿ, from Abū Saʿīd al-Khudrī, that the Messenger of God—peace and blessings be upon him—said:
“Do not sell gold for gold except equal for equal, hand to hand; and do not try to gain a surplus in any part of it. Do not sell silver for silver except equal for equal, hand to hand; and do not try to gain a surplus in any part of it. Nor may you sell any of it that is absent for that which is present.”
This is among the most authentic traditions in this chapter, and the ḥadīth of ʿUbādah ibn al-Ṣāmit is likewise sound on the matter. Hence the majority relied on these explicit texts.
As for the ḥadīth of Ibn ʿAbbās, it is not explicit here, for it reaches us in two wordings:
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“Usury is only in deferment.” From this wording the permissibility of disparity can be inferred only through an argument from silence, a weak form of proof—especially when an explicit text opposes it.
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“There is no usury except in deferment.” This version is stronger, for its apparent sense implies that anything other than deferment is not ribā. Yet it is possible that his meaning was simply that ribā occurs predominantly in cases of deferment. Because this interpretation is conceivable, and the previous ḥadīth is an explicit text, the latter must be construed in a manner that reconciles the two.