and actions. This is polytheism, falsehood, misguidance, arrogance and conceit. For someone acting as another’s deputy issues commands and prohibitions and performs acts of which the person who appointed him had no knowledge, which he was unable to perform, and concerning which he had issued no command or prohibition. Rather, the deputy’s commands are of the same kind as those of the original principal, as with an agent and his principal, or an executor and the testator. Their relationship is comparable to that between two partners.

Accordingly, the Sharia recognizes this arrangement: jurists hold that partnership in conducting transactions is based on agency, and that a partner acts on his own behalf by virtue of ownership, and on his partner’s behalf by virtue of agency and representation.

An executor, however, has still broader powers, because he acts after the testator’s authority to issue instructions has ended with death. He therefore enjoys a degree of independence that neither an agent nor a partner possesses. Indeed, jurists disagreed over whether he may appoint a successor: those who prohibited an agent from appointing another agent nevertheless permitted this. They even permitted the executor to undertake transactions