for each prayer time, or making do with a single dry ablution; and accepting testimony given by members of protected non-Muslim communities against one another, or refusing to accept their testimony.

The same applies to partnerships whose capital consists of goods, credit-based partnerships, agreements to tend any kind of tree in return for a share of its yield, and sharecropping on land without trees. These arrangements are of the same kind as labour partnerships. Indeed, more scholars prohibit these forms of partnership than prohibit labour partnerships. Nevertheless, from the time of their Prophet until today, Muslims in every age and region have continued to practise sharecropping and fruit-sharing, without anyone objecting to their doing so. If people were prevented from entering into such transactions, many of their essential interests, without which neither their religious nor their worldly affairs can be properly sustained, would be undermined.

For this reason, Abū Hanīfah would issue fatwas declaring sharecropping impermissible, yet derive further rulings on the basis of the view permitting it, saying:

“People do not follow my opinion prohibiting it.”

This is why his two disciples adopted the view that it is permissible, as did those scholars among the followers of al-Shāfiʿī and others who favoured that view.