Fundamentals and Evidence ofConditional Sale

A conditional sale is that the parties to the transaction stipulate that whenever the seller rejects the price or the like to the customer within a certain period, he terminates the transaction and if he does not use his right of termination, the sale will be finalized. According to the well-known opinion of Imamiyyah foqaha[1] and Article 459 of the Civil Code, as soon as a contract is concluded, the customer becomes the owner of the specified goods. Examining conditional sale in the history of Iranian law shows that conditional sale has been severely abused, and a legitimate and legal symbol has been abused, and riba[2] being ḥarām[3] in the holy sharia[4] has taken on a legal appearance; that is, in order to escape sharia law that does not allow riba, the lender pretendedly buys the borrower's property, and the contract stipulates that, if the seller pays the price within a certain period, he has the right to terminate the transaction. Additionally, since the property and consequently its benefits were transferred to the buyer, he rented the property to the seller and took the interest - that is actually riba- he desired as the rent of the property. Pursuant to the provisions of the Law on Registration of Deeds and Property, in order to prevent opportunists from abusing the conditional sale, and having taken into account the economic and social problems, the legislature has entered to define conditional sale, and thus has placed such a pretended sale (deal) out of a real sale and has attached it to mortgages and secured transactions. In this article, by examining the principles and arguments of conditional sale in fiqh, we intend to scrutinize this development.