no advantage accrues to the former—no special gain or benefit at all. Hence they concluded: once the price is fixed and publicly known, it is permissible for the town-dweller to sell on behalf of the Bedouin.

Some scholars tried to extract from the underlying rationale an additional condition: that the commodity must be of common necessity, something people regularly need, whereas items seldom required would be exempt. This deduction is weak. The sound view is that the ruling is the same whether the goods are widely needed or only rarely.

The second matter is intercepting incoming traders (talqī al-rukbān). In earlier days people knew that desert folk would arrive with merchandise—say, early Friday morning—so a person might leave the town, go a short distance outside, meet the caravan, and buy the goods before they ever reached the market. By doing that he deprives the townspeople, who are waiting for the caravan in order to purchase at a low price, and he also cheats the traders by underpaying them. Intercepting the caravan therefore brings two harms: first, to the residents of the town who were hoping to buy affordably; second, to the traders themselves, for the interceptor defrauds them by buying below the market rate before they have a chance to learn the going price.

For this reason the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said, “Whoever intercepts them and buys from them, then when they reach the marketplace the seller has the choice.” In other words, if someone meets the supplier outside the town and buys his goods, but once inside the town the supplier realizes he has been cheated, he is free to cancel the sale, having been deceived and wronged