by customary usage and the question asked. We have already cited the reports in the two Sahīh collections from Rāfiʿ ibn Khadīj and from Zuhayr ibn Rāfiʿ, who said:

“The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, summoned me and asked, ‘What do you do with your fields?’ I replied, ‘We lease them in return for the produce along the irrigation channel and measures of dates and barley.’ He said, ‘Do not do that. Cultivate them yourselves, let others cultivate them, or retain them.’”

This explicitly states that the prohibition concerned what they had been doing. Sharecropping as such, however, was not covered by the prohibition. Nor did Rāfiʿ and the others mention it among the permissible forms of leasing, because—and Allah knows best—they regarded it as a category distinct from customary leasing. Leasing denotes an arrangement requiring a specified rental payment, whether a particular asset or a debt. If the payment is a guaranteed debt for which the lessee is personally liable, it is permissible. The same applies if it is a particular asset other than the crop. But if it is a particular portion of the crop, it is not permissible.

As for sharecropping in return for an undivided share of the entire crop, this is not leasing in the ordinary sense; rather, it is purely a partnership. There is no greater reason to regard the cultivator as leasing the land for a share of the crop than to regard the landowner as hiring the cultivator for the remaining share. Although some people also call this leasing, it is leasing only in the broad sense explained earlier—not in the specific sense in which Rāfiʿ and the others used the term. For this reason, Rāfiʿ explained one of the two permissible forms of leasing and also explained the other form, which they had been forbidden to practise. He did not address partnership, because it belongs to a different category.