This is the distinction between marriage and sale: a sale at the customary price—that is, the prevailing market price—or a hire at the customary rate is not valid. Al-Shāfiʿī and many of Ahmad’s followers conceded to them, with regard to sales, this premise upon which they based their analogy.

As for hire, the followers of Abū Hanīfah, Mālik, Ahmad and others hold that the customary fee is due wherever established practice dictates it. Examples include entering a bathhouse whose proprietor ordinarily charges admission; staying in an inn or room customarily let for payment; entrusting one’s food or bread to someone who cooks or bakes for payment, or building work to someone who works for payment; riding an animal belonging to someone who hires out mounts; or boarding a boat whose boatman carries passengers for payment. According to the majority of scholars, these constitute contracts of hire, and the customary fee is due even if payment was not stipulated.

These, then, are contracts of hire at the customary rate. Likewise, if someone buys food at the price at which the market settles, at the price charged to other customers, at its purchase price in its place of origin, or at its marked price, this is permissible according to one of the two positions within the school of Ahmad and others. Ahmad explicitly addressed these and similar cases elsewhere, although the books of many of his later followers contain only the view that these contracts are invalid, following the position of al-Shāfiʿī and others. A detailed discussion of these questions belongs elsewhere.

Our purpose here was to discuss “questions of child custody.” Those who believed that the mother was given precedence because maternal kinship takes precedence built upon a weak premise, and the conclusions following from that weak premise were therefore weak as well. The invalidity of a necessary consequence entails the invalidity of the premise from which it follows. Rather, the correct view, beyond any doubt, is that she