Moreover, the duties imposed by the Sacred Law that are the exclusive right of God fall into three general categories: 1) acts of worship such as prayer, almsgiving, and fasting; 2) penal sanctions, whether fixed (ḥudūd) or left to judicial discretion (taʿzīr); and 3) expiations. Each of these, in turn, is subdivided into bodily, financial, and combined obligations.

Bodily acts of worship include prayer and fasting; financial ones include the alms-tax; while a composite act of worship is the pilgrimage. Financial expiations cover feeding the poor; bodily expiations include fasting; a composite expiation is the obligatory sacrificial offering slaughtered by the pilgrim. Bodily punishments include execution and amputation; financial punishments include destroying vessels used for wine. Composite punishments include flogging a thief who stole from an unsecured place while also doubling the financial liability against him, and likewise waging war on unbelievers—killing them and seizing their property.

Just as bodily punishments may at times be retributive for a past offence, such as amputating the hand of a thief, and at other times preventative, such as executing a murderer, so financial punishments operate in the same way. Among them are measures designed to eradicate an evil; and, like bodily measures, they fall into three kinds: destruction, alteration, or transferring the property to someone else.

1. Destruction: When the evil resides in a tangible object or in the form it takes, the object itself may be destroyed along with the evil. Idols worshipped beside God are a case in point. Because their very form is an abomination, their substance may be destroyed; if they are made of stone, wood, or the like, it is lawful to smash or burn them. The same applies to musical instruments such as the tunbūr: the majority of jurists permit destroying them—this is Mālik’s view and the more widely transmitted of the two reports from Aḥmad. The same ruling holds for wine vessels: they may be smashed or ripped open. Likewise, a shop that sells wine may be burned down. Aḥmad declared this explicitly, as did a number of Mālikīs and others, basing themselves on the authenticated report that ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb ordered a wine shop belonging to Ruwaishid al-Thaqafī to be set on fire, saying to him, “You are no ‘Ruwaishid’; you are a mere reprobate!” In the same vein, the Commander of the Believers ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib ordered that a whole village where wine was being sold be burned—this is related by Abū ʿUbayd and others—because the place of sale is treated in the same way as the containers that hold the wine. This, too, is the well-known position in the schools of Aḥmad, Mālik, and others.

A comparable example is what ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb did when he saw a man who had diluted his milk with water