—about whether he thereby becomes perjured.

The governing principle in this chapter is to look first and foremost at what the swearer intended. If he had no intention, one turns to the background of the incident and to what prompted him to make the oath; thereafter judgment is rendered according to what people of his time would most commonly understand from such wording. Anyone who comes seeking a fatwa outside a court setting must settle upon an intention and a purpose, and he is held to what he intended. Grasp this point well, for it is the foundation of this chapter. When an oath is unsupported by either context or intention, the swearer is deemed perjured by everything to which the term he used applies. Base your ruling on that, God willing.

If a person swears by declaring a specific item of his property to be charity—for example, saying, “My house,” or “this garment of mine, is charity for the poor,” and then breaks his oath; or he swears, “My house is charity for you,” or “for So-and-so,” and subsequently breaks that oath—no judicial compulsion is imposed upon him in any of those cases, though he is instructed and advised to carry it out. The same holds if he simply says, without an oath, “My house is charity for the poor” as a voluntary act: he is likewise not forced to remove it from his ownership and give it to the poor, just as he would not be forced were it linked to an oath that he later violated; rather, he is only encouraged to do so. Compulsion is exercised solely when a person donates a specified item of his property to a particular individual and no perjury is involved. If he then refuses to hand it over, he is compelled and judgment is entered for the recipient—provided that the gift was to a named individual who demands it and that it was not conditional upon an oath that was later broken. This is the view of Mālik, Ibn Wahb, Ibn al-Qāsim, and Ashhab.