The corpus already carries the binding murābaḥa promise to purchase (Res 40-41) and the organised-tawarruq prohibition (Res 179).
The corpus already carries the binding murābaḥa promise to purchase (Res 40-41) and the organised-tawarruq prohibition (Res 179). This is the Academy's OWN general ruling on the promise itself — the device modern Islamic finance is built on. Resolution No. 157 (6/17) 'Mutual Promises and Collusion in Contracts' (17th session, Amman, Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, 24-28 June 2006). It draws the one line a buyer needs: a pair of promises made binding to answer a GENUINE need to obligate a future deal (a documentary credit) is lawful; a pair of promises wired together only to reach a return the plain sale forbids is ʿīnah in another dress, and prohibited. A binding promise is still not a sale — it moves neither ownership nor price until the real contract — and the only remedy for breaking it is the actual damage done, never the profit hoped for.
What this source says
THE PROMISE THAT DOES THE WORK OF A CONTRACT. Modern Islamic finance leans hard on the promise. You promise to buy; the bank promises to sell; and on that pair of promises a murābaḥa home purchase, an ijārah-to-own or a documentary credit is built. Resolution No. 157 (6/17) is the Academy's general ruling on when that pair of promises may be made binding and when making it binding is a trick that reaches exactly what the sale ban was meant to stop. It builds on the murābaḥa binding-promise ruling — 'Having recalled the Academy resolution nos. 40-41 (2/5-3/5),' — and states the wider principle behind it.
THE DEFAULT: BINDING BEFORE ALLĀH, NOT BEFORE A JUDGE. The first head sets the baseline. 'In principle, mutual promises between the two parties are binding from the religious perspective, but they are not so on legal grounds.' A promise is a trust you owe Allāh to keep; it is not, by itself, an enforceable contract. That distinction is the whole hinge of the resolution: a promise is not a sale, so treating a bilateral promise as if it had already transferred the goods or created the debt is the error the remaining heads guard against.
THE LINE THAT MATTERS: NEED, NOT EVASION. The second head names the abuse directly. 'Mutual promises as a trick for evasion of restrictions on Ribā is prohibited in Shariah. It is like collusion to practice ʿĪnah or the prohibition of combining sale and a loan.' If two promises are wired together only so that, taken as a pair, they deliver a guaranteed return the direct sale could not, that is ʿīnah in another dress — and it is forbidden. This is the same instinct the corpus's Res 179 applies to organised tawarruq: a chain of individually-lawful steps assembled to manufacture a loan-with-interest is judged by what it manufactures, not by the innocence of each step.
WHEN A BINDING PROMISE IS ALLOWED. The third head carves the genuine exception. Where a sale simply cannot be concluded yet — 'In cases where it is not possible to conclude a sale contract because the commodity is not in seller's possession,' — and there is a real commercial need to lock the future deal — 'while there is a general need for obligating the two partiers - by virtue of law or international commercial traditions - to conclude the deal at a definite future date' — then, and the resolution gives its working example, '(as in the case of opening documentary credits, LC), mutual promises can be made binding either through government regulations or by mutual consent of the two parties in the contract.' The test is need, not appetite: a documentary credit obligates buyer and seller to a future sale because international trade cannot run otherwise, and that is lawful; wiring promises together to escape the riba rules is not.
A BINDING PROMISE IS STILL NOT A SALE. The fourth head stops the exception from collapsing back into the abuse. Making the promise binding does not quietly turn it into the contract itself. 'When mutual promises become binding, as indicated in the third paragraph above, they do not become a sale contract suspended on a future date.' The consequence is precise: 'such mutual promises neither transfer ownership of the object to the buyer nor create a debt of the price on him.' Ownership and price still wait for the real offer and acceptance at the agreed date — which is exactly why a bank running a promise-driven murābaḥa must genuinely own and hold the asset before it sells it on, and cannot book the profit as though the sale had already happened.
WHAT BREAKING IT COSTS. The fifth head fixes the remedy, and it is the same ceiling the corpus draws everywhere. If a party walks away from a binding promise, 'he can be forced by law to conclude the contract or bear the actual damage that falls on the other party due to breach of commitment (not to include any opportunity cost).' Actual loss, never the profit the other side hoped to make — the identical line Res 212 draws for a lost investment deposit and Res 40-41 draws for the murābaḥa promise-breaker.
HOW IT CLOSES. Res 157 is FULLY SETTLED — not a deferral and not merely confined. It 'Resolves' across five ordinal heads and carries NO Recommendations section, deciding the subject in the body and signing off, as these resolutions do, 'Indeed, Allāh is All-Knowing.'
HOW TO CITE IT HONESTLY. Res 157 grades no company and blesses no branded structure. What it hands a Muslim buyer is a single question to hold against any promise-driven product — the binding promise to purchase at the heart of a home-finance murābaḥa, an ijārah-to-own, or a commodity-murābaḥa deposit: does this binding promise answer a genuine need to obligate a future deal that cannot be concluded today, or is it wired to a matching promise only to deliver a return the plain sale forbids? If the first, the resolution permits it; if the second, no certificate rescues it — it 'is like collusion to practice ʿĪnah', and the remedy for breach is never more than the actual damage done.
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 157: the IIFA Official Edition (Resolutions and Recommendations of the International Islamic Fiqh Academy, Oct 2021), Resolution No. 157 (6/17). 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_res157.py, 23/23 spans across three blocks; audit_res157.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 recitals recalling Res 40-41; the 'Resolves' with its five heads — the religious/legal distinction, the ban on the promise-as-riba-trick, the genuine-need exception for documentary credits, the promise-is-not-a-sale rule, and the actual-damage-only remedy; 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_res157.py 23/23; audit_res157.py re-extracts and re-verifies every quotation from the finished JSON). Cross-references (Res 40-41 recalled by the resolution; Res 179, Res 212, Res 40-41 cited in the prose as in-corpus signposts) are reported as stated, not reproduced.
- School / basis
- Comparative fiqh al-muʿāmalāt (al-muwāʿadah / mutual promises and their use as ḥiyal in contracts) with a PRIMARY OIC collective text. Resolution No. 157 (6/17), 17th session (Amman, Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, 24-28 June 2006). Recalls the murābaḥa binding-promise ruling Res 40-41 (2/5-3/5) and states the general principle behind it: mutual promises are binding religiously but not legally; making them binding is lawful only to answer a genuine need to obligate a future deal (documentary credits) and unlawful where it is a device to evade the restrictions on Ribā (likened to ʿīnah and to combining sale and a loan); a binding promise remains distinct from the sale (no transfer of ownership, no debt of the price); the remedy for breach is confined to actual damage, excluding opportunity cost.
- 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 general, SETTLED ruling on the promise — the device nearly every promise-driven Islamic-finance structure (murābaḥa home purchase, ijārah-to-own, commodity-murābaḥa deposit) is built on. Res 157 (6/17) was the next candidate named by the previous run (Res 212): 'binding mutual commitments and collusion to make contracts, cited by Res 238's Type I ruling.' Re-checked ON DISK: UNCOVERED (no *resolution-157* file; the corpus held the murābaḥa binding-promise Res 40-41 and the organised-tawarruq Res 179, but not the Academy's general test for when a mutual promise binds vs when it is a riba-evasion trick), SETTLED (its 'Resolves' rules across FIVE ordinal heads; not a deferral; NO Recommendations section, so fully settled rather than merely confined), SUBSTANTIVE (a hold-a-structure-against-it question a buyer can use). Three settledness gates clean on the primary: 0 keyword, 0 paraphrase, 5 operative heads. Two negative controls — for the first time BOTH from Res 157's own contracts/finance family: (1) Res 187 (2/20) 'Cooperative Insurance' caught by the PARAPHRASE gate only (keyword-invisible deferral, 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; cross-referenced resolutions' content NOT reproduced beyond the reference Res 157 itself makes. Articles 129->130 (65 IIFA resolutions); corpus total 227->228. Build/lint green (see punch-list). NEXT candidate: the muʿāmalāt corpus is now deep (65 IIFA resolutions on disk), so FIRST list content/articles/ and diff against the source's table of contents to find a genuinely UNCOVERED, SETTLED muʿāmalāt resolution — do not trust a remembered number. Verify absence on disk, confirm a real 'Resolves' (not a deferral), and RUN ALL THREE SETTLEDNESS GATES VERIFY 'Resolves' on disk AND confirm not already covered before writing. AVOID the whole-subject deferrals already logged (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
mutual-promisesmuwaadabilateral-promisebinding-promisepromise-to-purchasecollusioncontractsmurabaharesolution-40-41ijarah-muntahia-bittamliklease-to-owndocumentary-creditsletter-of-creditribariba-evasionhiyallegal-tricksinahbay-al-inahcombining-sale-and-loantawarruqorganised-tawarruqresolution-179religiously-bindinglegally-bindingownership-transferdebt-of-priceoffer-and-acceptancesuspended-salebreach-of-commitmentactual-damageopportunity-costunrealized-profitpossessionconstructive-possessionislamic-financeislamic-bankingfully-settledoic-fiqh-academyiifacollective-ijtihadprimary-textresolution-157
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