Book of Pre-emption
Chapter: Property in which pre-emption applies and property in which it does not apply

In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Compassionate

Chapter: Property subject to pre-emption and property exempt from it

There is no shufʿah (right of pre-emption) in any estate that has already been partitioned and whose boundaries have been formally set; this rules out pre-emption for a neighbour, whether he lives close by or farther away. Pre-emption is restricted to undivided joint ownership of real property in all its forms—houses, land, shops, orchards, gardens, vineyards—indeed, anything that can be divided and whose limits can be surveyed and staked out: residential plots, surrounding walls or enclosures, every kind of land, and everything physically attached to it that is deemed integral to the property.

The scholars differ over what is transmitted from Mālik concerning pre-emption in public bathhouses and in properties that either cannot be divided at all or could only be divided with harm to one of the co-owners, such as very small shops, houses, rooms and the like. The more widely accepted report from Mālik imposes the right of pre-emption in bathhouses and in all such cases, and that is the sound view according to his general principle, for he never varied in obligating the division of all such property, whether large or small, in—