the land receives rent for it. Yet the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, ruled to the contrary when he said:

“Whoever cultivates people’s land without their permission has no share of the crop, but is entitled to reimbursement of his expenses.”

Ahmad and other jurists versed in hadith adopted this hadith. Some who adopted it considered it contrary to analogical reasoning and an instance of juristic preference. This was because the aforementioned analogy had become established in their minds: that the crop follows the seed, and the tree follows the fruit stone. Yet what the Sunnah teaches is itself the sound analogy to which natural human disposition points. Casting grain into the earth is precisely like depositing semen in the womb. Thus Allah called women a field of cultivation when He, Most High, said:

“Your wives are a field of cultivation for you.”

Likewise, He called cultivated land a field of cultivation. In determining ownership of offspring, it is the maternal side that takes precedence. Thus a human child follows the mother, rather than the father, in freedom or slavery, while an animal’s unborn offspring belongs to the mother’s owner, not the owner of the sire, for whose breeding services charging a fee is forbidden. This is because the elements the offspring derives from its mother are many times greater than those it derives from its father. The father’s claim is limited to his role in initiating the process, though there is no doubt that the offspring is created from both parents together.

The same applies to grain and fruit stones: most of the elements from which Allah creates trees and crops come from soil, water, and air. This may affect the land, leaving it depleted through cultivation. But since these elements are continually replenished—for Allah, glorified is He, constantly supplies the land with water, air, and soil, whether formed by the transformation of other matter or drawn from what already exists, and the loss of soil particles does not affect the land at all, either because they are replaced through transformation or because of their abundance—