under a loan for use or a lease, and its term has expired or the arrangement was open-ended, the owner of the trees must pay the fair rent. The land is assessed as bare land, without trees, and then assessed with those trees; the amount arrived at is the fair rent. And Allah knows best.

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

A soldier received a grant from the sultan consisting of the land-tax revenues from a parcel of land. That land had previously been granted to another soldier, who died—may Allah Most High have mercy on him—after sowing it using his own seed and oxen. The sultan’s revenue official ruled that the new grantee should receive half the crop and the deceased’s heirs the other half, after first taking one-twentieth of the entire crop. He was then to give the heirs of the deceased cultivator one-quarter of his own half, because the sultan reserves one-quarter of the land-tax revenues for the deceased’s heirs, while the grantee receives three-quarters. Is this division permissible, and may the land tax be collected in this manner? If not, what should the ruling be according to the noble Sharia?

Furthermore, the revenue officials ordered him to take from the deceased’s heirs the seed needed for this land in the coming year, as a loan documented by a deed for the purpose of cultivating the granted land, and to repay it to them over two years. Is that permissible or not?

He replied:

This grant is not merely a grant of the land-tax revenues, as the questioner supposed. Rather, it is a grant of the right to derive income from the land. Grants are of two kinds:

A grant conveying ownership