then likewise, when the two partners stipulate that a particular plot is to belong to one of them, they depart from what a partnership requires, for a partnership requires sharing in the yield.

If one partner has exclusive rights to a specified plot, the other has no share in it, and the arrangement involves risk and takes on the nature of gambling, as Rāfiʿ explained when he said:

“Sometimes this plot would yield a crop while that one yielded nothing.”

Thus one partner gains while the other receives nothing. This is the essence of gambling. Rāfiʿ also stated that “during the Prophet’s lifetime, peace and blessings be upon him, this was their only form of rent.” It was prohibited only because of the risk and the element of gambling it involved. The prohibition therefore concerned that customary form of leasing, not arrangements in which the rent is a guaranteed debt owed by the tenant. Allah willing, I shall point to a similar distinction concerning his prohibition of selling fruit before it begins to ripen. Rāfiʿ knew best precisely what the Prophet’s prohibition, peace and blessings be upon him, concerned.

This—and Allah knows best—is what ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿUmar ceased doing. For when Rāfiʿ related the report to him, he said:

“I knew that we used to lease our fields in return for the crops growing along the large waterways and some of the straw.”

He thus made clear that they used to lease land in return for the crops from a designated plot. Ibn ʿUmar had followed this practice because they had done so during the lifetime of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, until the prohibition reached him.

The evidence for this is that Ibn ʿUmar continued regularly to narrate the hadith concerning the arrangement at Khaybar and to issue rulings based upon it. He also issued rulings permitting sharecropping on bare land, as did members of his household, even after Rāfiʿ’s report.

Thus Harb al-Kirmānī related: Ishāq ibn Ibrāhīm narrated to us