is contingent on both parties treating as the capital the price for which the garment was purchased. Should they designate that price as the principal, another difficulty arises: the working partner may feel obliged—out of eagerness to secure the qirāḍ—to accept the owner’s claim about the price without verification.

Mālik’s position on funding a qirāḍ with coined gold or silver is not uniform. Ashhab transmits that he prohibited it outright, whereas Ibn al-Qāsim reports that he allowed it, though he still forbade it when the metal had been fashioned into jewellery. Al-Shāfiʿī and the Kūfan (Abū Ḥanīfah) also rule it impermissible. Those who disallow a qirāḍ funded with coined precious metal liken it to merchandise; those who permit it liken it to dirhams and dinars, on account of the relatively slight variation in its market value.

Mālik’s associates likewise disagreed about qirāḍ with copper fulūs: Ibn al-Qāsim forbade it, while Ashhab permitted it, a view also held by Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan.

The great majority of scholars—Mālik, al-Shāfiʿī, and Abū Ḥanīfah—maintain that if one man is owed a debt by another, he may not present that debt to the debtor as qirāḍ capital before actually taking possession of it.

For Mālik the rationale is the fear that the debtor may be insolvent; the creditor therefore seeks to defer collection in hopes of an increase, which would amount to the usury that is forbidden.

For al-Shāfiʿī and Abū Ḥanīfah the reason is that what exists merely as a liability cannot simply change its legal character and become an entrusted property.

They also differ regarding a case in which a man instructs someone to collect a debt owed to him by a third party and then invest it on the basis of qirāḍ. Mālik and his followers disallow this, because it imposes an extra burden on the agent—the task of collection—thereby falling under Mālik’s principle that any stipulation of an additional benefit renders the qirāḍ invalid. Al-Shāfiʿī and the Kūfan allow it, arguing that the owner has merely appointed him as an agent to collect the debt; the collection itself is not a condition of the investment, and so the arrangement is valid.

As for the formal definition of qirāḍ, it is the one already set out.

Chapter Two
Issues of Conditions in Qirāḍ

In sum, the conditions unanimously deemed invalid are those that lead, in the scholars’ estimation, to excessive uncertainty (gharar) or indeterminacy. Nor is there any disagreement that if either party stipulates for himself an additional share of the profit beyond what the qirāḍ was concluded upon, the stipulation is void; for that would render the agreed-upon share unknown. This is Mālik’s fundamental rule that a qirāḍ may not be combined with a sale, lease, loan, wage, or any other benefit that one of the two parties stipulates for himself along with the qirāḍ. Such is the common ground, though they disagree in detail.

One point of dispute arises when the working partner stipulates that all the profit be his. Mālik says it is permissible; al-Shāfiʿī says it is not; Abū Ḥanīfah says the transaction is a loan, not a qirāḍ. Mālik regards it as an act of benevolence on the part of the investor, a voluntary gesture, for the latter is free to grant him even a small fraction of a large capital. Al-Shāfiʿī, however, considers it gharar: if there is a loss it falls entirely on the investor—thus differing from a loan—whereas if there is a profit the investor receives nothing.

Another case concerns the owner’s stipulating that the agent guarantee the capital. Mālik rules the qirāḍ invalid, a view shared by al-Shāfiʿī; Abū Ḥanīfah and his colleagues maintain that the qirāḍ itself is valid but the stipulation is null.

And their principal evidence