He replied:

Yes, the profit-sharing investment arrangement terminates upon the capital owner’s death. If the working partner knows of his death and then transacts without the owner’s permission, whether express or established by custom, and without lawful authority, he is a wrongful possessor.

The scholars have differed concerning the profit earned in this situation. Does it belong solely to the owner, like the natural increase of property? Or solely to the working partner, because he bears liability for the capital? Or must they give it away in charity because it is an unlawful profit? Or is it shared between them?

There are four opinions. The soundest is the fourth: the profit is shared between them according to customary practice in comparable cases. This was the ruling of the Commander of the Faithful, ʿUmar ibn al-Khattāb—may Allah be pleased with him—concerning the public treasury funds that his sons took and traded with without entitlement. He treated it as a profit-sharing investment, and the jurists relied on his ruling in the chapter on “Profit-Sharing Investment.”

This is because the profit is an increase generated jointly by one party’s labor and the other’s capital. It therefore belongs to both, like any other increase arising from two contributing sources. The right belongs to them alone and extends to no one else. There is no basis for declaring it unlawful for both of them or awarding it exclusively to either one.

Requiring that the working partner receive the customary profit share for someone in his position is sounder than requiring customary remuneration. The capital may yield no profit, and the remuneration for the work may be several times the profit, or vice versa. These partnerships do not have the work itself as their object, such that remuneration would be due for it, nor are they contracts of hire. Rather, they constitute a distinct contractual category: they are partnerships, not contracts of hire, such that whatever invalidates the latter should invalidate the former. Whoever imposes obligations upon them that they do not entail has erred.

If, however, the working partner and the heirs exchanged words that imply, according to