The same applies to someone who tends another person’s livestock, orchard, or land until it yields crops, milk, or offspring. Some scholars, however, do not permit such work in return for a share of the yield; they permit only hiring for a wage.

The more correct of the two scholarly opinions is that orchard-tending agreements for a share of the yield and sharecropping agreements are permissible, whether the seed comes from the owner, the worker, or both. Thus:

“The Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, made an agreement with the people of Khaybar for half of the fruit and crops it produced, on condition that they cultivate it at their own expense.”

Al-Bukhārī narrated this in his Sahīh. Likewise, Companions of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, such as Saʿd ibn Abī Waqqās, Abdullāh ibn Masʿūd, and others, would entrust land to someone to cultivate, with the cultivator providing his own seed and the crop being shared between them. Most households among the Emigrants and the Helpers engaged in sharecropping.

The Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, forbade the form of sharecropping known as mukhābara that they used to practise: they would stipulate that the landowner receive the crop from a particular plot. This is established in the two Sahīh collections. This arrangement, which the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, forbade, is prohibited by scholarly consensus, just as it would be prohibited to stipulate in a profit-sharing investment partnership that one party receive a fixed sum of dirhams.

Justice requires that they share whatever increase Allah provides, each receiving an undivided proportional share. They thus share in both gain and loss. If nothing is produced, one loses the benefit of his property, and the other loses the benefit of his labour.