To coerce vendors into selling their goods only at a fixed price is an illegitimate form of compulsion. If it is not lawful to force them to sell in the first place, then obliging them to accept a predetermined price is likewise impermissible.

As for the person who is duty-bound to sell, his case resembles that of the man for whom the Prophet ﷺ fixed the price and thereby imposed a ceiling. In the two Ṣaḥīḥs the Prophet ﷺ said:

“Whoever frees his share in a slave and possesses wealth sufficient to cover the slave’s full price, the slave is appraised at a fair value—without undervaluation or inflation. He must then pay his partners their portions, and the slave becomes completely free.” 1

Here the owner is required to enable his partner to emancipate the remaining share by compensating him. Consequently the entire slave is assessed at a just market value—neither discounted nor exaggerated—and the partner receives his proportional share. According to the overwhelming majority of scholars—Mālik, Abū Ḥanīfah, and Aḥmad—the partner’s right is to one-half of the total value, not to the value of one-half. Hence they said: whenever a property cannot be physically divided, it must be sold and the proceeds distributed if even one partner demands it, and the reluctant partner is compelled to consent. Some Mālikīs recorded consensus on this point, for the partner’s entitlement to half the overall price, as the sound hadith proves, can be satisfied only by selling the whole.

If the Lawgiver obliges the removal of an item from its owner’s possession—with equivalent compensation—because the partner needs to complete emancipation, and if the owner may not demand more than half the value, then how much more compelling is the case of someone whose need is greater than freeing that share, such as the desperate need for food, clothing, and the like. What the Prophet ﷺ ordered—the appraisal of the whole at the going market rate—is, in essence, price-setting.

Likewise, a partner may exercise the right of pre-emption and take over the half sold to a stranger for precisely the price the buyer paid, with no increase, in order to remove the harm of joint ownership and forced partition. This is established by recurrent Sunnah reports and by scholarly consensus. It obliges the purchaser to accept that exact price, without any surcharge, to achieve the benefit of unified ownership for one party. If that is permissible, then all the more so in matters of even greater urgency. Thus the seller has no right to demand from his partner more than the price for which he himself acquired it. In reality, this falls under the rubric of tawliyah (transfer at cost).

1 Hadith number 1.