such cases, and no fixed wage becomes due, for a named wage could consume the capital and even exceed it many times over. In contracts judged invalid, therefore, what becomes due is analogous to what would have been due had the contract been sound, and what is owed under a sound contract is not a specified rental fee but an undivided, stipulated share of the profit; the same is owed under the invalid form.

Share-cropping (muzāraʿah) is rooted in the logic of leasing yet is closer to equity and to sound legal principles, for both parties share in gain and loss alike. Pure leasing is different: the landowner receives the rent in full while the tenant farmer may or may not reap a harvest. Scholars have disagreed over the permissibility of each, but the correct view is that both are lawful, whether the land has been granted as an allotment (muqattaʿah) or not. I know of no Muslim jurist—among the four canonical schools or any others—who has ever said that leasing granted land (iqṭāʿ) is impermissible, and Muslims have continued to rent out allotted lands from the time of the Companions until today.

Some people of our time, however, have introduced this claim, arguing that the allottee does not own the usufruct and is therefore like a borrower who sublets borrowed land. This analogy is mistaken for two reasons:

First, the borrower never possessed the usufruct as a right; it was only a gratuitous favor from the lender. The usufruct of Muslim lands, by contrast, is the collective right of the Muslims, and the ruler is merely a distributor who apportions their rights among them, not a donor like the lender. The allottee receives the usufruct by right of entitlement, just as a waqf beneficiary receives the benefits of an endowment—indeed with even stronger justification. If it is permissible for that beneficiary to lease out the endowment, even though he may die and the lease would then lapse according to the sounder opinion, it is all the more permissible for the allottee to lease the iqṭāʿ, even if the lease should dissolve at his death or for some other reason.

Second, were the lender to authorize subletting, the sublease would be valid; the same applies to an iqṭāʿ. The ruler explicitly permits the allottees to lease their land—indeed he granted the allotment so that they might benefit from it, whether through share-cropping or through leasing. Whoever forbids benefiting from such land by lease or share-cropping harms the Muslims in both their religious and worldly affairs, for dwellings—shops, houses, and the like—yield benefit to the allottee only through leasing, while farms and orchards can be used through leasing, share-cropping, and musāqāh on a broad scale.