another person may buy that property from him, even if he does not consider the underlying transaction permissible. Thus, if these levies were imposed by someone who believed them permissible because someone had issued him a fatwa to that effect, or who held that taking this property and spending it on jihad and other public interests was permissible, another person may buy that property from him, even if he does not believe that its initial collection was permissible.

Accordingly, anyone who believes that the authorities have a tenable interpretive justification for their actions may buy what they have collected, even if he himself does not consider their actions permissible. For example, a ruler might accept the equivalent value of the zakat due, and someone might buy some of what he has received. Or he might confiscate property from certain officials in a manner he believes permissible. Or he might hold that people are obliged to support jihad with their wealth, and that the levies collected constitute property that may legitimately be taken and spent on jihad. The same applies to other interpretations that may be mistaken but nevertheless fall within the legitimate scope of independent legal reasoning.

If the ruler has received the property on this basis, it is permissible to buy it from him, and likewise from the deputy whom he instructed to collect it, even if the buyer does not regard its collection as justified. The buyer has not wronged its owner, for he has purchased it with his own money from someone who received it in a manner he believed permissible. If this is the case, purchasing it is lawful according to the sounder of the two scholarly positions; it is not a doubtful matter. For if it is permissible to buy from non-Muslims what they have received through contracts they believe permissible—even though those contracts are forbidden in the religion of the Muslims—then