The corpus rules the contracts a Muslim freely negotiates, but not the ones nobody can negotiate
The corpus rules the contracts a Muslim freely negotiates, but not the ones nobody can negotiate — the take-it-or-leave-it bills for water, gas, electricity and the phone. Resolution No. 132 (6/14) 'Adhesion Contracts' (14th session, Doha, State of Qatar, 11-16 January 2003) is the Academy's settled ruling on exactly that contract: a monopoly supplier of a good 'all people need and cannot do without', dictating every term, with no room to bargain. It draws the line a captive buyer needs — a fair-priced adhesion contract is valid and binding and neither state nor court may unpick it; an oppressive one, priced with 'extreme inequity' or loaded with 'arbitrary and harmful conditions', obliges the state to enforce a fair price or cancel the unfair terms, 'in application to the Shariah vital principle of justice'.
What this source says
THE CONTRACT NOBODY GETS TO NEGOTIATE. The corpus is deep on the contracts a Muslim enters by choice — murābaḥa, ijārah, salam, istiṣnāʿ, the company share (Res 130). But a household's largest recurring commitments are contracts it never bargained at all: the water, gas, electricity and telephone accounts, offered on the supplier's terms alone, take it or leave it. Resolution No. 132 (6/14) 'Adhesion Contracts' is the Academy's settled ruling on that contract. It 'Resolves' across five numbered heads and carries NO Recommendations section — the subject is decided in the body and signed off, 'Indeed, Allāh is All-Knowing.'
WHAT MAKES A CONTRACT AN ADHESION CONTRACT. The first head defines the thing precisely. 'Adhesion Contract is a western recent legal term given to agreements' marked by four conditions together. It is a necessity: 'The contract relates to goods or services that all people need and cannot do without, such as water, electricity, gas, telephone, mail services, public transport, etc.' The other side is a monopolist: 'The supplier of such goods or services has an actual or legal monopoly status in their provision or at least controls their provision to the extent that makes competition very restricted.' The terms are dictated: 'The supplier alone has exclusive control over the detailed terms and conditions of the contract, leaving no room for the other party to negotiate, drop, or amend any of them.' And it is offered to everyone alike: 'The offer (supply) is made unified and continuously open to the whole public with the same terms and conditions.'
IT IS STILL A REAL CONTRACT. The second head forecloses the objection that a contract you cannot bargain is no contract. 'The Adhesion Contract is concluded by the meeting of the offer and acceptance, which are presumed in any means that indicates the mutual consent of its two parties' — signing up for the supply, paying the bill, is a valid acceptance. Being unable to haggle does not void the consent; the agreement binds.
THE SAFEGUARD BUILT IN BEFORE IT REACHES YOU. The third head is the resolution's structural answer to the monopolist's power. Because the dominating party may fix the price and terms 'at a level that harms the public', the Academy rules 'it is mandatory in Shariah that adhesion contracts must be subject to state revision before implementation so that the state can endorse those which prove to be fair, and amend or cancel those which could lead to oppression of the complying party; this is in application to the Shariah vital principle of justice.' The check comes before the contract is imposed, not only after a dispute — the authority (walī al-Amr) vets the standard terms up front.
THE TWO CATEGORIES — WHEN THE STATE MUST STAY OUT, AND WHEN IT MUST STEP IN. The fourth head splits every actually-concluded adhesion contract in two, and this is the line a captive buyer needs. 'First category: adhesion contracts that have a fair price, and do not contain any oppressive conditions regarding the complying party. A contract of this kind is valid in Shariah and binding to its two parties.' Here the answer is hands-off: 'Neither the state nor the judiciary has the right to interfere for cancellation or amendment of such contract, as there will remain no Shariah justification for doing so.' A fair monopoly bill is simply a valid sale, and being compelled by need to buy it does not make the fair price unjust. The other category is the oppressive one: 'Second category: is adhesion contracts, which are oppressive to the complying party because of their unjust price (comprising extreme inequity) or its arbitrary and harmful conditions. In this case, the state should interfere to enforce a fair price' — reducing the charge to what similar goods and services normally cost, or striking out the unfair conditions. The resolution grounds the intervention in two Fiqh Maxims it quotes directly: that 'Public interest supersedes private interest', and that 'Private harm should be endured for warding off public harm.'
AND THE EXCLUSIVE IMPORTER. The fifth head applies the same logic to the sole agent of an imported good. 'In the exclusive agency of imports, three cases should be distinguished:' where the good is dispensable or a substitute exists at a fair price, the agent may sell at the agreed price and neither state nor court may fix it; where the good is an indispensable need but the agent offers it fairly, again no interference — exclusive ownership lawfully disposed of harms no one; but where the good is an indispensable need and the agent will part with it only 'for an excessively high price or subject to oppressive conditions', 'the state must interfere with warding oppression off those who need it by way of enforced pricing on the agent.'
HOW TO CITE IT HONESTLY. Res 132 blesses no utility and condemns none. What it hands a Muslim household is a two-part test for the bills it cannot negotiate: is the price the normal price for the like service, and are the terms free of arbitrary, harmful conditions? If yes, the contract is valid and binding — the inability to haggle is not itself a wrong, and there is no Shariah ground to break it. If the monopolist exploits the need with an extortionate price or oppressive conditions, the remedy the resolution names is public, not private: it is the state's duty to enforce a fair price or cancel the unfair terms, on the principle that a private harm is borne to ward off a public one. The resolution decides the framework and the duty; it fixes no number, names no regulator, and leaves the fair price to be the customary price for similar goods and services.
Wording inside quotation marks is quoted from the source. The rest is this notebook’s summary of it — read the original before relying on it.
Provenance
- Compiled from
- Compiled 2026-07-21 from the International Islamic Fiqh Academy's OWN OFFICIAL ENGLISH text of the resolution. PRIMARY AND SOLE AUTHORITY FOR EVERY VERBATIM SPAN ATTRIBUTED TO RES 132: the IIFA Official Edition (Resolutions and Recommendations of the International Islamic Fiqh Academy, Oct 2021), Resolution No. 132 (6/14). Compiler role limited to selection, translation-faithful quotation and cross-referencing within the corpus; no ruling, figure, scholar, board or product is asserted beyond what the resolution itself states. Every quoted span is machine-verified as an exact substring of the source under a canonical normalisation (build_res132.py, 26/26 spans across three blocks; audit_res132.py re-extracts every quotation from the finished JSON and re-verifies it against the source).
- Source
- PRIMARY TEXT (full title; session, city, country and dates; the 'Resolves' with its five heads — the four-condition definition, the offer-and-acceptance conclusion, the mandatory state revision before implementation, the fair vs oppressive two-category split with the state's duty and the two Fiqh Maxims, and the three exclusive-agency-of-imports cases; and the devotional close). International Islamic Fiqh Academy, Official Edition (Oct 2021). No Recommendations section — the ruling is fully settled in the body. Every verbatim span machine-verified against this source (build_res132.py 26/26 across three blocks; audit_res132.py re-extracts and re-verifies every quotation from the finished JSON). The two Fiqh Maxims are reported exactly as Res 132 quotes them.
- School / basis
- Comparative fiqh al-muʿāmalāt (Shariah rulings on the adhesion / standard-form monopoly contract and state intervention in its pricing) with a PRIMARY OIC collective text. Resolution No. 132 (6/14), 14th session (Doha, State of Qatar, 11-16 January 2003). Defines the adhesion contract by four conditions (a necessity good/service; a monopoly or competition-restricting supplier; terms dictated by the supplier with no room to negotiate; a unified standing public offer); holds it concluded by offer and acceptance on mutual consent; makes it mandatory in Shariah that such contracts undergo state revision before implementation; and splits actually-concluded contracts into a fair category (valid and binding, no state or judicial interference) and an oppressive category — unjust price of 'extreme inequity' or arbitrary/harmful conditions — in which the state must enforce a fair price or cancel the unfair terms, grounded on the Fiqh Maxims that public interest supersedes private interest and that private harm is endured to ward off public harm. It rules the parallel three cases of the exclusive agency of imports. No Recommendations section — fully settled in the body.
- Captured
- 2026-07-21
- Added
- 2026-07-21
- Trust
- Primary or near-primary source with a stable public URL.
Compiler’s note
Added 2026-07-21 (auto-run). The OIC Fiqh Academy's SETTLED ruling on the adhesion (standard-form monopoly) contract — the take-it-or-leave-it utility bill a household cannot negotiate — named by the previous run (Res 130) as the settled-and-distinct lead. Re-checked ON DISK: UNCOVERED (no *resolution-132* file; the corpus held the freely-negotiated contracts and the company-form ruling Res 130, but not the monopoly-supplied-necessity contract and state price-correction), SETTLED (its 'Resolves' rules across FIVE numbered heads with lettered sub-points; not a deferral; NO Recommendations section, so fully settled rather than merely confined), SUBSTANTIVE (the fair-vs-oppressive test a captive buyer needs). Three settledness gates clean on the primary: 0 keyword, 0 paraphrase, 11 operative units (5 numbered + 6 lettered); Res 132 carries NO defer/postpone token at all. Two negative controls, both proven muʿāmalāt-family deferrals: (1) Res 77 (8/8) 'Shareholding in Joint-Stock Companies Dealing with Ribā' caught by the PARAPHRASE gate only ('commission further research') though it carries NO deferral KEYWORD — the Res 200 finding made concrete; (2) Res 122 (4/13) 'Diminishing Mushārakah in light of Contemporary Contracts' caught by BOTH gates (bare 'Postponement'). DROPPED per no-fab: no provider, scheme, scholar, board, figure, rate, fee, threshold, statute or regulator; NO scriptural text; the two Fiqh Maxims are reported exactly as Res 132 quotes them, no others reproduced. VERIFICATION: build_res132.py = 26/26 hand-listed spans across THREE blocks (keyed by block; union never used) + both negative-control proofs + the settledness gates. audit_res132.py re-extracts every quotation from the FINISHED JSON on disk and re-verifies against the source (multi-block haystack: Res 132/77/122), 0 waived; no-figure + no-scripture assertions hold. Articles 131->132 (67 IIFA resolutions); corpus total 229->230. Build/lint green (see punch-list). NEXT candidate: keep diffing content/articles/ against the source TOC for a genuinely UNCOVERED, SETTLED muʿāmalāt resolution — do NOT trust a remembered number. Res 133 (7/14) Problem of Arrears in Islamic Financial Institutions is uncovered and settled but heavily REPRODUCES already-covered Res 51/85/109 quotes (poor no-fab candidate — would need careful span discipline); Res 147 (5/16) International Commodities and their Trading Standards is settled but largely reconfirms the covered Res 63. Verify absence on disk, confirm a real 'Resolves' (not a deferral like Res 77/87/88/89), and RUN ALL THREE SETTLEDNESS GATES before writing. AVOID the whole-subject deferrals already logged (Res 77 (8/8), Res 87 (4/9), Res 122 (4/13), Res 124 (6/13), Res 187 (2/20), Res 188 (3/20)) and Res 237 (8/24) on electronic currencies.
Topics
adhesion-contractsstandard-form-contractstake-it-or-leave-itmonopolyutilitieswaterelectricitygastelephonepublic-transportnecessity-goodsprice-fairnessjust-priceextreme-inequityoppressive-conditionsstate-interventionwali-al-amrprice-controlenforced-pricingconsumer-protectionoffer-and-acceptancemutual-consentcontract-validitybinding-contractexclusive-agencyimportscommercial-agencyfiqh-maximspublic-interestmaslahajusticemuamalatislamic-financefully-settledoic-fiqh-academyiifacollective-ijtihadprimary-textresolution-132
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