Chapter on the Permissibility of Leasing Land for a Known Consideration and the Prohibition of Invalid Stipulations

Hadith 1 (1)
Rāfiʿ ibn Khadīj reported: “We, the Anṣār, owned the greatest number of fields. We used to lease out the land on condition that the produce of this plot would be ours and that of the other plot would be theirs. At times this plot yielded while that one did not, so he ﷺ forbade us to do that. As for payment in silver coin, he did not prohibit it.”

Hadith 2
In Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim it is narrated from Ḥanẓalah ibn Qays: “I asked Rāfiʿ ibn Khadīj about leasing land for gold and silver. He replied, ‘There is no harm in it. People during the Prophet’s time ﷺ used to rent land for what grew along the mādiyānāt and the fronts of the canals and for certain parts of the crop; one portion might perish while the other remained. People had no other form of lease than that, and for that reason he forbade it. But if the consideration is something definite and guaranteed, there is no objection.’”

mādiyānāt: the large rivers. Jadwal: a small stream.

Uncommon Vocabulary
ḥaqlan: with an open ḥāʾ and a quiescent qāf, in the accusative as a distinguishing term. Originally it meant fertile, fallow land; later it came to denote the crop itself, and from it the verb muḥāqala was derived.

mādiyānāt: with a dotted dhāl followed by a kasra, then a yāʾ, then an alif and nūn, and after that another alif. Al-Khaṭṭābī said it is a foreign (Persian) word (2) that entered Arabic.

aqbāl al-jadāwil: with a fatḥa on the hamza, then qāf and bāʾ. Aqbāl means “the beginnings,” and jadāwil is the plural of jadwal, “small river.”

Overall Meaning
These two hadiths explain in detail which forms of land leasing are valid and which are invalid.

Rāfiʿ ibn Khadīj relates that his family possessed more farms and orchards than anyone else in Madinah. They used to lease their land in the pre-Islamic manner: the land was handed over to be cultivated on the understanding that one side of the harvest belonged to the owner and the other side to the cultivator. Sometimes one side would prosper while the other was destroyed.

They would also reserve for the landowner the choicest produce, such as that which grows along the rivers and canals,