is comparable to what is due under a valid contract. What is due under a valid contract is not a specified wage, but a specified, undivided share of the profit. Something comparable is therefore due under an invalid contract. Agricultural sharecropping is more clearly lawful than leasing and more consistent with justice and the principles of the law, for both parties share in gain and loss. Leasing is different: the landowner receives the rent, while the tenant may or may not obtain a crop. Scholars differ over the permissibility of each arrangement, but the correct view is that both are permissible.

This applies whether the land has been allotted or not. I know of no Muslim scholar—whether belonging to the four schools or otherwise—who has said that leasing allotted land is impermissible. Muslims have continued to lease allotted land from the time of the Companions down to our own day. Some people of our time, however, have introduced this novel opinion. They argue that the allotment-holder does not own the right to use the land and is therefore like a borrower who leases out land lent to him. This analogy is mistaken for two reasons.

First, the borrower had no entitlement to the use of the land; rather, the lender granted it to him gratuitously. As for lands belonging to the Muslims, the right to use them belongs to the Muslims. The ruler distributes their entitlements among them; he is not making a gratuitous grant to them as a lender does. The allotment-holder enjoys the use of the land by virtue of his entitlement, just as the beneficiary of an endowment enjoys its benefits—indeed, with even greater entitlement. If the beneficiary of an endowment may lease the endowed property, even though he may die and the lease would then terminate upon his death according to the sounder of the two scholarly opinions, then it should be permissible for the allotment-holder to lease the allotted land