and if he usurps a date-palm grove or a vineyard which then bears fruit and he consumes what it yields, or a house and takes up residence in it, or a slave and exploits his labor, or sheep whose milk he drinks or whose wool he shears, he must pay the value of every benefit he has taken, or provide its like when a like exists.
If the thing seized is a mount that he rides, or a slave whose service he uses, no compensation is due for the ride or for the service itself. Yet, should he hire the animal out for a fare or the slave for wages, he must return the whole amount he collected along with the animal or the slave.
Whoever seizes a house, an animal, or anything else and derives profit from it is obliged to hand over its yield to the rightful owner.
Imam Mālik’s statements about someone who usurps a house and lives in it, or land and cultivates it, differ. On one occasion he ruled that no rent is payable for the period of residence or cultivation, and a number of his companions agreed. On another occasion he held that rent is payable for whatever the usurper has occupied and cultivated, as though he had leased the property and received its rent; some of his companions supported this view. That opinion conforms to analogical reasoning (qiyās), and it is the position I adopt.
The distilled ruling of his school is that if a person seizes the right of residence in a house and then lives in it, he must pay the rent; but if he seizes the house itself without residing in it or collecting rent for it, no rent is due.
If, after profiting from a slave’s earnings, the hire of beasts, the revenue of land, the fruits of trees, and the milk and wool of sheep, the original property perishes while still in his possession, he is liable for the value of those originals, for the prices at which he sold any offshoots or by-products, and for the value of everything he consumed or otherwise benefited from—except for what I have already cited from Mālik concerning the use of a slave’s labor and the riding of beasts.
Ibn al-Qāsim maintained that, once the owner has taken the value of the original stock (al-ummahāt) when it is lost, he may not also claim the produce, by analogy with Mālik’s ruling that, when a female slave is lost, the master may take either her child or her value, but not both.
The sounder view, however, is the one I have just set out, and it is the opinion upheld by the majority of the scholars of Medina as well as others among Mālik’s followers and beyond.