I have seen someone make a prior arrangement with the purchaser on this basis, then allocate part of the price to each kind of fruit as it begins to ripen. These are feeble legal stratagems whose true nature is obvious, as discussed above. Scholars and believers of sound natural disposition continue to object to prohibiting transactions of this kind, and the fundamental principles of the Sharia are incompatible with such a prohibition. Yet what they have heard of general rules based on scriptural wording and analogy, which they believe encompass such transactions, together with the statements they have heard from scholars who include them within those general rules, is what has led to this result.

This also follows by analogy from the permissibility we have established of selling the entire crop of a cucumber plot once it begins to ripen. Separating its successive yields is difficult or impossible, just as separating the different varieties in a single orchard is difficult. The difficulty is, however, greater with a cucumber plot; hence some, such as Mālik, permitted its sale while prohibiting the combined sale of different varieties.

If it is objected:

This arrangement falls within the general scope of the Prophet’s prohibition—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—on selling fruit before it begins to ripen. This differs from leasing someone the land and trees for him to work, which, as you have explained, does not fall within that general prohibition, since it is a lease to someone who will work, not the sale of an asset. Here, however, it is a sale of fruit, so it falls within the prohibition. How, then, can you contravene that prohibition?

We reply:

The answer to this is the same as the answer concerning the purchase—permitted by the Sunnah and scholarly consensus—of trees together with their fruit before it begins to ripen, and of land together with its crops before their grain has hardened; and concerning our defence of purchasing cucumber crops even though some of