such as a third or a half. If either partner is assigned a fixed amount, that is not justice but injustice. Some scholars have regarded these partnerships as hiring contracts with unspecified remuneration. They therefore said that legal analogy requires their prohibition. Some of them prohibited sharecropping in orchards and fields but permitted profit-sharing investment partnerships by juristic preference on grounds of need, since dirhams cannot be leased. This is Abū Hanīfa’s position.

Others permitted orchard sharecropping, either without restriction, as in Mālik’s position and al-Shāfiʿī’s earlier position, or only for date palms and grapevines, as in al-Shāfiʿī’s later position, because trees, unlike land, cannot be leased. They also permitted such agricultural sharecropping as was needed as an adjunct to orchard sharecropping. Thus, they permitted agricultural sharecropping as an adjunct to orchard sharecropping when the land predominated, as in al-Shāfiʿī’s position, or limited it to one-third, as in Mālik’s position.

The majority of the early generations and the jurists of the major centres, however, said that these arrangements are partnerships, not hiring contracts in which the labour itself is the object. What each party seeks is the resulting fruit and crops. They are partners: one contributes his labour and the other his property, just as in a profit-sharing investment partnership.

For this reason, the sounder of the two scholarly opinions is that when these partnerships are invalid, the customary share is due, not the customary wage. Thus, a third or a half of the profit or increase is due, according to the customary practice in comparable arrangements. A fixed payment is not due, for it could consume the entire capital and several times its amount. Rather, in an invalid arrangement, what is due