The root of their disagreement here lies in a clash between the general purport of the textual evidence and analogy, and even between one analogy and another.
Among the finest opinions reported about a man who strikes another’s eye and deprives it of part of its sight is the ruling transmitted from ʿAlī—may Allah be pleased with him. He ordered that the victim’s sound eye be bandaged. He then handed an egg to a man, who walked away with it while the injured party watched until he could no longer see it; at that point ʿAlī drew a line on the ground. Next he had the damaged eye bandaged and the sound one uncovered, gave the same man the egg again, and had him walk off while the victim watched until it disappeared from view. At the instant it vanished, ʿAlī drew another line, measured the distance between the two lines, compared that distance to the full range of vision of the sound eye, and awarded the victim the corresponding proportion of the diyah.
He would verify the claimant’s honesty about the ranges of perception of the impaired and the sound eye by repeating the experiment several times in different directions; if the distances proved identical, the man’s claim was accepted.
The jurists differ over an eye whose form remains but whose sight is gone. Mālik, al-Shāfiʿī, and Abū Ḥanīfah levy a discretionary assessment (ḥukūmah). Zayd ibn Thābit assigns one-tenth of the diyah, namely one hundred dinars, which al-Shāfiʿī interprets as an appraisal rather than a fixed fraction. A report from ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb and Ibn ʿAbbās awards one-third of a diyah for such an eye, for a paralysed hand, and for a blackened tooth alike.
Mālik adds that the diyah of a tooth becomes complete when it turns black; if it is extracted after blackening, a further diyah is owed.
The scholars also disagreed about a one-eyed man who deliberately puts out the eye of someone with normal sight. The majority say that if the victim does not pardon, he may exact qiṣāṣ; if he pardons, he may take the diyah—some holding it to be a full diyah, others one-half. The latter view is that of al-Shāfiʿī and Ibn al-Qāsim, and both positions are transmitted from Mālik; al-Mughīrah and Ibn Dīnār among his followers opt for the full diyah. The Kufan jurists maintain that the fully-sighted victim has only the right to qiṣāṣ, or to whatever settlement the two parties agree upon.
Those who oblige a full diyah when retaliation is waived argue that the offender must pay for what the victim has left to him—namely his single eye—which many jurists value at an entire diyah. ʿUmar, ʿUthmān, and Ibn ʿUmar ruled that if the eye of a one-eyed man is gouged, one thousand dinars become due, because that lone eye serves him in the stead of two; if therefore the victim spares it, its full diyah is obligatory. The opposing camp insists on the original rule—one eye equals half a diyah—while Abū Ḥanīfah’s principle is that deliberate injury carries no fixed diyah. This issue has already been discussed in the chapter on retaliation for wounds.
The majority of scholars and leading muftis—Mālik, Abū Ḥanīfah, al-Shāfiʿī, al-Thawrī and others—state that each finger is valued at ten camels, that all fingers are equal in this regard, and that each phalanx carries one-third of that amount, except for fingers with only two phalanges, such as the thumb; for each of its phalanges five camels are due.