and al-Shāfiʿī in his earlier position. Abū Hanīfa, however, does not permit it under any circumstances; and al-Shāfiʿī, in his later position, permits it only for date palms and grapevines. Thus, in this transaction, they have been compelled to designate the rent as payment for the use of the land, while the owner gratuitously grants the tenant either the fruit of the trees or preferential terms in the fruit-sharing agreement. The need for this transaction is so pressing that one of Imam Ahmad’s followers who wrote against legal stratagems included this stratagem among those that are permissible—I mean the stratagem of granting preferential terms in a fruit-sharing agreement.

Yet the explicit position transmitted from Ahmad and most of his followers is that this very stratagem is invalid, as is also the position of Mālik and others. Prohibiting these stratagems is unquestionably correct, on account of the report of ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAmr that the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said:

“It is not lawful to combine a loan with a sale, to stipulate two conditions in a sale, to profit from something for which one has not assumed liability, or to sell what you do not have.”

This was narrated by the five imams: Ahmad, Abū Dāwūd, al-Nasāʾī, al-Tirmidhī, and Ibn Mājah. Al-Tirmidhī said: “A good and authentic hadith.”

The Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, thus prohibited combining a loan with a sale. Combining a loan with a lease constitutes combining a loan with a sale, or something equivalent to it. Every gratuitous benefit combined with a sale or lease—such as a gift, a loan for use, a grant of tree-fruit, or preferential terms in a fruit-sharing or sharecropping agreement, and so forth—is equivalent to a loan in this respect.

The overall meaning of the hadith, then, is that one must not combine an exchange for consideration with a gratuitous benefit, because that