the abbasìd’s golden age 187throughout the Islamic state? Or did he want to tax the land in
Arabia in that particular manner, but allow land outside Arabia to
be taxed differently? We do not know the answer to either question,
and a variety of answers are possible. But, on the whole, the argu-
ment of the Œanafìchief justice seems to carry “legal” conviction.
Lands of Qata"i
Abù-Yùsuf then turned his attention to an important tax base which
by the standard of the day must have been of a sensitive nature:
the fiefs, or sawàfì lands; the terms are used interchangeably. He
began by clarifying, or rather, stating a condition for the land to be
regarded as such. The condition was that these lands were crown
lands which belonged to: (a) the Persian king, or his family, (b) a
man who had been killed in war without heirs, (c) one who had fled
to the land of the enemy, (d) the under-water lands, (e) post office
buildings, and (f ) all the lands that did not belong to anyone or had
a right of inheritance on them, or had a sign of any development
on them.
When this land, or part of it, is given to someone in apprecia-
tion of his services the land under the new owner is called qata"i. In
that, Abù-Yùsuf argued that the ruler had the right to give rewards
out of sawàfì land to those who had offered valuable services to
Islam, and a just ruler would do that without undeserved preference
between them. In that, Abù-Yùsuf differed from those jurists who
held the view that the lands belonged to all Muslims and therefore
should not be distributed to anyone. Instead, he took the opposite
view that contended that the ruler might grant this land to some-
one, as the Prophet did with the land of Banù-al-Nadhìr and the
other lands that were in his disposition. One could argue, however,
that the land given by the Prophet was modest in size in comparison
with lands allocated after him. Abù-Yùsuf, however, did not elabo-
rate on this and briefly based his opinion on the Prophet’s Sunnah.
Was Abù-Yùsuf trying to please his caliph by giving him a free
hand in distributing this land, or did he really believe that a degree
of flexibility ought to be guaranteed in order to improve the efficiency
of the land by putting it in charge of able persons? The answer is
perhaps both. However, judging by how Abù-Yùsuf was able to
address his caliph objectively, or daringly, in his introduction, one