this intention, just as animals do. Nevertheless, without discernment, their sounds and utterances have no legal effect. A discerning child, however, and an insane person who sometimes possesses discernment have their words given legal weight when they possess discernment.

“The fifth”

This falls within declaratory and informative rulings, not prescriptive rulings. Whether an intoxicated person is liable to punishment has no bearing on the validity or invalidity of his contracts. Contracts are neither acts of worship for which one is rewarded nor offences for which one is punished. Rather, they are legal acts undertaken by the righteous and the wicked, believers and disbelievers alike, and are an indispensable part of human life. Human welfare cannot be secured without agreements and their fulfilment, because people need one another to obtain benefits and avert harm. Such agreements can proceed only from reason. Someone who possesses neither reason nor discernment has therefore neither made an agreement, sworn an oath, sold anything, contracted a marriage, pronounced a divorce, nor freed a slave.

This is clarified by the well-established agreement that, before wine was prohibited, an intoxicated person’s words had no legal effect. Thus, when Hamzah ibn ʿAbd al-Muttalib, may Allah be pleased with him, said while intoxicated before the prohibition:

“Are you anything but slaves of my father?”

he was not held accountable for those words. Likewise, when one of the earliest Emigrants muddled his recitation of the surah “Say: O disbelievers” before the prohibition, he was not reproached. Similarly, if disbelievers were to drink wine, make agreements, and stipulate conditions, these acts of theirs would, by consensus, be given no legal weight. The same applies to someone whose intoxication is not punishable—for example, someone who drinks something without knowing that it will intoxicate him, or the like. As for someone who becomes intoxicated by drinking something forbidden, there is no doubt that he incurs sin