It is said that this opinion, which denies granting of ownership to the person who reclaims a wasteland is incompatible with the permissibility of sale of the land, because according to this opinion the person does not acquire ownership of the reclaimed land. Therefore it should not be permissible for him to sell it. (The issue is) while he only acquires a right (of use) to it, the permissibility of selling the land he rehabilitates is well established in the Shari’ah.

Our reply is this. The sale transaction effectively confers upon the buyer the same relationship that binds the seller with the property - in return for the seller’s acquisition of the same relationship that binds the buyer with the money he paid to the seller - regardless of whether the relationship is at the level of ownership or at the level of right (of use). Therefore, it is permissible for the person who rehabilitates a land to sell it because he enjoys a personal relationship with the land. It is the relationship to which we technically call the right to use. Therefore, it is possible for him to sell the land in the sense of conferring upon the buyer this relationship in return for his acquisition of the relationship of the buyer with the money he receives as the price.

This permissibility may also be explained in another way. It is that the person who reclaimed the land sells his right, and not the land itself. But this explanation does not stand because selling of an item means the seller’s conferring to the buyer the relationship that binds him with the object. Consequently, the assumption of a relationship between the seller and the object sold is inevitable, as the underlying object exchanged between the buyer and the seller. But the right is only a legal prescription and the seller’s relationship in the form of the legal prescription is unlike his relationship with all of his possessions.

For example, he does not own the legal prescription; or in other words a legal prescription is not saleable because of the non-existence of its supplementary and transferable connection with the seller. The right is only a legal prescription so its sale is not conceivable. Furthermore, it is the product, which the buyer acquires possession of, not the buyer becoming the owner of the right (of use). If the land were an item owned by the seller - like all his other belongings - then the sale would result in the buyer’s acquiring the right of the seller and not to his earning of this right. There is a difference between the buyer acquiring the right of the seller and his right established to it on his own.