Thus, the established practice was to postpone payment until the date-cutting season; some liken this to the rule of zakāt, but that analogy is weak because it clashes, by way of qiyās, with the very Sunnah on which the licence rests. Nevertheless, Malik maintains that if, once the contract is concluded, the parties voluntarily agree to advance the dried dates, it is permissible.

His further condition that the dispensation applies only to five wasqs or less rests on the report he transmitted from Abū Hurayrah: “The Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—allowed the sale of ʿarāyā on the basis of estimation for an amount below five, or up to five, wasqs.” Two readings are related from Malik on the words “five wasqs,” the uncertainty arising from the narrator’s own doubt in the ḥadīth.

Malik also stipulates that the produce exchanged must be of the very same kind once it has dried. The basis is the report from Zayd ibn Thābit: “The Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—permitted the owner of an ʿarīyah to sell it, according to estimation, for dried dates,” recorded by Muslim.

Al-Shāfiʿī, for his part, builds on the ḥadīth of Rāfiʿ ibn Khadīj and Sahl ibn Abī Ḥathmah: “The Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—forbade muzābanah, the exchange of dates for dates, except for the owners of ʿarāyā; he granted them permission,” and on the wording, “so that its people may eat it fresh.” In his view the term ʿarīyah denotes any amount of dates less than five wasqs. The reason is that customary practice was for a man, when giving away palm-trees, to give roughly that quantity or less, so the licence was confined to the quantity normally covered by a gift and therefore took the name of a gift.

He also cites, though with a broken chain of transmission, the report from Maḥmūd ibn Labīd: “He asked one of the Companions of the Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—either Zayd ibn Thābit or someone else, ‘What are these ʿarāyā of yours?’ The Companion mentioned a group of needy Anṣār who had complained to the Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—that the fresh dates had arrived while they had no cash with which to buy them and eat along with the people, even though they did have surplus dried dates for their sustenance. The Prophet allowed them to purchase ʿarāyā, assessed by estimation, with those dried dates so that they might eat the dates fresh. Deferred delivery of the dried dates was not allowed, because that would be selling food for food on credit.”

Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal relies on the plain sense of the earlier ḥadīths: the Prophet granted the concession of ʿarāyā without restricting it to the original donor as opposed to others.

Abū Ḥanīfah, on the other hand, having deemed muzābanah impermissible, and viewing any sale-construction of the ʿarīyah as a species of muzābanah, held that the transaction’s reversion to the donor is not a sale at all. Rather, it is the donor’s retraction of his gift by giving the estimated amount in dried dates; calling it a “sale,” for him, is only figurative. Mālik himself alluded to this meaning in one of the reports from him, for he disallowed its sale for dirhams or for anything other than the estimated dried dates, even though the more widely held view