Rather, what is intended is emphasis and magnification, just as Allah says about the hypocrites, who will never be forgiven: “Whether you ask forgiveness for them or you do not ask forgiveness for them—if you ask forgiveness for them seventy times, Allah will never forgive them” (Qur’an 9:80).
14- Only the decrees, rulings, conditions, and limits laid down by Allah are to be followed. Anything beyond them is neither to be followed nor relied upon, for it opposes truth and justice.
15- Walāʾ (clientage) belongs exclusively to the emancipator; it is a bond like that of kinship, establishing inheritance, mutual support, and closeness.
16- Emancipation, by whatever means—whether through a mukātabah (manumission contract), an act of expiation, or sheer benevolence—is what creates walāʾ.
17- Conditions that contradict the very purport of a contract are void in themselves, yet they do not nullify the contract. A sale, for example, entails that walāʾ accrue to the purchaser who frees the slave, so stipulating that walāʾ belong to anyone other than the emancipator conflicts with the contract’s purport and is therefore invalid.
A synopsis of Ibn Taymiyyah’s discussion of valid and invalid conditions:
He, may Allah have mercy on him, observed that the issue can be framed in two principal positions:
- The default with respect to contracts and the conditions attached to them is prohibition, except where the Sacred Law has expressly allowed them. This is the view of the Ẓāhirīs; many foundational principles of Abū Ḥanīfah rest on it, as do numerous principles of al-Shāfiʿī and of some scholars from the schools of Mālik and Aḥmad. Imām Aḥmad at times invalidates a contract because no report or analogy establishes its permissibility, and some of his disciples declare a condition void for contradicting the contract’s purport, saying, “Whatever contradicts the contract’s purport is null.” The Ẓāhirīs validate neither contract nor condition unless a text or consensus affirms its permissibility. Abū Ḥanīfah’s legal principles likewise preclude any condition that openly conflicts with the contract’s purport. Al-Shāfiʿī agrees that every such condition is void, though he exempts certain cases on the strength of specific evidence, and a group of Aḥmad’s followers concur with al-Shāfiʿī in principle yet allow even more exceptions than he does.
These three schools thus differ with the Ẓāhirīs and permit more conditions, because they employ analogy and glean meanings from the texts that the Ẓāhirīs do not. The evidence offered by these scholars is that