contracts of hire; for the object of a hire contract is the worker’s labour, and the work must be specified. Rather, the two enter into a partnership: one contributes the use of his land, and the other his labour and the use of his cattle, like other partners.

As for the sharecropping practice prohibited by the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, an authentic report explains that they used to stipulate that the landowner would receive the crop from a particular plot. That is why he prohibited it.

Those who stipulate that the seed must come from the owner have likened this arrangement to a profit-sharing partnership, in which one party must provide the capital and the other the labour. They assumed that the seed must come from the landowner, regarding both the land and the seed as capital. This is mistaken, for in such contracts the capital returns to its owner, just as capital returns in a profit-sharing partnership, land in sharecropping, and land and trees in an orchard-tending partnership.

When the worker sows the seed and consumes it in the process, without receiving an equivalent amount back, the seed is treated like benefits for which no equivalent is returned. The view of anyone who stipulates that the seed must come from the owner, yet that he is not to recover it, is utterly unsound. If it were capital, he would necessarily be entitled to recover its equivalent, just as that person maintains concerning a profit-sharing partnership.

He—may Allah have mercy on him—was also asked:

A man owns cultivated land as well as other land, and someone came to cultivate it for him on an equal-sharing basis, with the seed and all other expenses associated with the crop, so that when the harvesters take