this incident was bound to become widely known, yet no one objected to it. Moreover, he imposed kharāj (land tax) on kharāj land and tangible property—kharāj being rent according to Mālik, al-Shāfiʿī and the well-known position of Ahmad. The land bore trees, so he leased the whole together. This is the soundest opinion, and on this basis kharāj was waived for Muslims in such cases. It has two grounds.

The first is that the land must be leased, and this is possible only together with the trees. It is therefore permissible because of the need, since the two cannot be separated. Likewise, when some of the fruit on the trees begins to ripen, all of it may be sold by agreement. Indeed, according to the vast majority of scholars, when the fruit of one tree begins to ripen, this establishes ripeness for that variety throughout the orchard. There is disagreement concerning other orchards.

This is because individual cases and contracts may include, as subsidiary elements, things that cannot be included independently: the foundations and inner parts of walls, the work performed by animals, and the additional growth that occurs after the fruit begins to ripen. Likewise, it is authentically reported from the Prophet in the two Sahīh collections that he said:

“If someone sells date palms that have been pollinated, their fruit belongs to the seller unless the buyer stipulates otherwise.”

If the buyer stipulates that the pollinated fruit is included, this is permissible by the explicit text and scholarly consensus. Although the fruit has not yet begun to ripen, its sale is permitted as a subsidiary part of the sale of something else. There are other such examples.

Need may permit what would otherwise be impermissible, as with arāyā sales—exchanging fresh dates still on the palms for dried dates. Similarly, some scholars have permitted profit-sharing investment partnerships, orchard-sharing agreements and sharecropping as subsidiary arrangements, although their own analogical reasoning would rule them out, because they regard them as contracts of hire, as