the Muslim purchaser, if he paid the kharāj on it, would resemble non-Muslims under Muslim protection in undertaking to pay the jizya, for kharāj is the jizya levied on land. If he did not pay it, he would wrong the Muslims by depriving them of their entitlement from the land. They did not disapprove of selling it because it was an endowment. Selling an endowment is prohibited only because doing so nullifies the endowment; hence it may neither be sold, given away, nor inherited. Land subject to kharāj, however, passes to the heir by scholarly consensus, and it may be given as a gift. The recipient or purchaser takes the seller’s place and pays the kharāj previously due from him. Selling it does not harm those entitled to the kharāj, unlike selling an endowment.

Many jurists have mistakenly supposed that they disapproved of selling such land because it was an endowment. Their confusion arose because they encountered reports expressing disapproval of its sale and knew that ʿUmar had set it aside as property held for the Muslim community, never distributing it. Since this was effectively an endowment, they supposed that this was why selling it was considered reprehensible. They did not examine the matter carefully enough to see that this sale is not of the kind prohibited in the case of an endowment. The land’s revenue goes to those entitled to it on precisely the same basis before and after the sale. It is unlike a house which, once sold, ceases to benefit the endowment’s beneficiaries and becomes the purchaser’s property.

More astonishing still is that some of these jurists said: “The sale of Mecca’s residential properties was disapproved of only because it had been conquered by force and had likewise not been distributed.” Yet they themselves, along with everyone else, maintained that residential properties may be sold in territory conquered by force whose land was set aside as property held for the Muslim community. Kharāj was imposed only on farmland, not on residential properties. For even if