Ahliyya (legal capacity: to have rights and duties, and to act; its stages from the womb to full maturity, and what impairs it)

Ahliyya is lexically suitability. It is of two kinds: ¹

• Capacity of liability (ahliyyat al-wujub): the suitability to have rights and duties due to or from one. ¹
• Capacity to act (ahliyyat al-ada'): the suitability for an act to proceed from one in a manner the law recognises. ¹

• Taklif: the imposition on the addressee of what entails effort, to do or to abstain; capacity is a feature of the person who bears it. ²
• Dhimma: the state that makes a person fit to be bound and to bind; capacity follows from it. ²

Foetus, childhood, discernment, puberty and maturity. ⁵

Its capacity of liability is incomplete: it has rights to lineage, inheritance, bequest and, in the Hanafi and Maliki views, endowment, but no duty falls on it. ⁵¹²

The child has a full liability, so its dues are paid for it by the guardian where they can be paid by another, such as a debt or maintenance; penalties do not fall on it; bodily worship is not obligatory; and the views on alms differ. ¹²¹³

It begins, by the majority, at seven years; capacity to act is then partial, so it validates purely beneficial transactions and not purely harmful ones. Mixed transactions are disputed: the Hanafis suspend them on the guardian's consent, the Malikis make them valid but not binding, and the Shafi'is and Hanbalis void them. ¹³¹⁴¹⁵

It is shown by signs such as wet dreams, pregnancy or menstruation, or by age: Abu Hanifa sets eighteen for a boy and seventeen for a girl; the two disciples, al-Shafi'i and Ahmad fifteen; and the Malikis eighteen for both. ¹⁶

Maturity (rushd) is good management of property by the Hanafis, Malikis and Hanbalis, and sound religion and property by the Shafi'is. Property is not released without proof of it by the majority; Abu Hanifa releases it at twenty-five. ¹⁶⁶

• Heavenly: madness, imbecility, forgetting, sleep, fainting, illness, slavery, menstruation, childbirth and death. ^7891011
• Acquired: ignorance, drunkenness, jest, folly, travel, error and coercion. ¹⁰¹¹¹⁷
• Madness and imbecility remove the duty of worship but not liability; drunkenness is forbidden and gives no excuse; folly does not impair capacity but restricts the use of property. ⁶⁷¹⁰¹¹