the time of their Prophet and his Rightly Guided Caliphs. It was practised by the families of Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān, and ʿAlī, as well as other households among the Emigrants. Its permissibility was upheld by leading Companions such as Ibn Masʿūd. It is also the position of the jurists of hadith, including Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Ishāq ibn Rāhawayh, Dāwūd ibn ʿAlī, al-Bukhārī, Muhammad ibn Ishāq ibn Khuzayma, Abū Bakr ibn al-Mundhir, and others. It is likewise the position of al-Layth ibn Saʿd, Ibn Abī Laylā, Abū Yūsuf, Muhammad ibn al-Hasan, and other Muslim jurists.

The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) had arranged for the people of Khaybar to receive half the fruit and crops yielded by its land until his death. That arrangement continued until ʿUmar expelled them from Khaybar. He had stipulated that they cultivate it at their own expense, and they supplied the seed, not the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him). Thus, the sounder of the two scholarly opinions is that the cultivator may supply the seed. Indeed, a group of the Companions held that the seed must be supplied by the cultivator alone.

The Prophet’s (peace and blessings be upon him) prohibition of sharecropping and leasing land has been explained as referring to their practice of stipulating that the landowner receive the crops from a particular plot. Such a condition is invalid according to the revealed text and scholarly consensus. It is like stipulating, in a profit-sharing investment partnership, that the provider of capital receive a specified sum of dirhams: this is impermissible by agreement. Such dealings are founded on justice, and these arrangements are forms of partnership. A partnership exists only when each of the two partners has an undivided share