The well-known juridical opinion holds that natural springs that gush up in the private property of a person will be deemed as his because it emerges in his land. It was because of this that ash-Shaykh at-Tusi considers this type of newly discovered natural sources of water as a subject matter of controversy. He says the variation in opinions is in respect of its being the owned. For such springs, there are two views. One is that they are property of the landowners. The other is that it they do not belong to the respective landowners.

The fact is that I do not find an argument for ownership by the landowners from texts of the holy Qur’an or those of sunnah (the practice of the Prophet). The possibly strongest argument for ownership by the landowners is those legal texts that indicate a person’s ownership of the growth of his possession.

Our reply to the argument is that a new spring is in fact not a growth of his property in the sense of it being a fruit of his possession to justify ownership by him. It is a wealth inside of a wealth, in a sense similar to the content and a container, unlike a tree and its fruit. The ownership of the container does not justify the ownership of its content. In light of this we learn that the well-known juridical opinion holding the view that the ownership should be adopted if it is supported by intellectual argument such as the pious (imitative) consensus or the customary practice of the scholars that fulfils the conditions which we have expounded beforehand explicitly in the present book. Unless something of this nature supports it, there exists nothing in the arguments that which would justify its adoption.