at a fixed rate.

The well-known account is that he levied ten dirhams on each jarīb of grapevines, eight dirhams on each jarīb of date palms, six dirhams on each jarīb of green fodder, and one dirham and a qafīz of grain on each jarīb of cultivated crops.

The generally accepted position of Mālik, al-Shāfiʿī, and Ahmad is that this land-tax arrangement is treated as a lease. He refrained from setting a fixed term for it only in the public interest, and the land tax constitutes rent for the land. This is precisely the leasing of land containing trees, something upon which ʿUmar and the Muslims reached consensus in his time and thereafter. Hence Abū ʿUbayd expressed surprise at this in his Kitāb al-Amwāl (The Book of Wealth), considering this arrangement contrary to what he knew of the jurists’ positions.

Ibn ʿAqīl’s argument is that leasing land is permissible and needed. When it contains trees, it cannot be leased without leasing the trees as well; whatever is indispensable to something permissible is itself permissible. The tenant will not water the trees gratuitously, and he may not enter into an agreement to tend them for a share of their fruit.

Similarly, although Mālik and al-Shāfiʿī held that analogical reasoning precludes sharecropping, when a worker enters into an agreement to tend trees for a share of their fruit, and there is unplanted ground among them, they permit sharecropping on that ground as an adjunct to the fruit-sharing agreement. Mālik permits this if it amounts to less than one third, just as he held concerning the sale of trees as an adjunct to the land. Likewise, al-Shāfiʿī permits it if the unplanted ground is small in extent