Agricultural Land Usufruct Contracts in Islamic Jurisprudence and Contemporary Legal Frameworks: A Bibliometric and Doctrinal Analysis with Implications for Omani Law

HRMARS - Agricultural land usufruct arrangements play an important role in expanding access to land, supporting agricultural production, and regulating the relationship between landowners, cultivators, and public authorities. However, the related literature remains fragmented across land tenure, property rights, agricultural leasing, rural development, environmental governance, and Islamic jurisprudence. This study examines the development and conceptual structure of research on agricultural land usufruct and related legal frameworks while analysing the principal agricultural land-use models recognized in Islamic jurisprudence and their implications for Oman. An integrated bibliometric and doctrinal research design was adopted. The bibliometric analysis was based on 456 English-language Scopus-indexed publications published between 2016 and 2025, refined from an initial set of 869 records. Performance analysis, citation analysis, collaboration analysis, keyword co-occurrence, and thematic mapping were used to examine publication growth, scholarly influence, and the intellectual structure of the field. The results show that annual publication output increased from 26 documents in 2016 to 71 in 2025, representing an approximate compound annual growth rate of 11.81%. The corpus received 9,546 citations and achieved an h-index of 53, while internationally co-authored publications represented 33.11% of the dataset. Land Use Policy emerged as the most productive and influential source, while China, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Ethiopia were among the leading contributing countries. The conceptual analysis identified seven major research clusters centred on land tenure and leasing, tenure security and property rights, land grabbing and sustainability, land reform and policy, political economy, land consolidation and markets, and urbanization and remote sensing. The doctrinal analysis further distinguished ij?rah, muz?ra?ah, mus?q?h, mugh?rasah, and i?y?? al-maw?t as functionally different models for structuring agricultural land use, benefit sharing, labour, investment, and risk. The study concludes that agricultural usufruct regulation in Oman would benefit from clearer contractual provisions concerning duration, cultivation obligations, production inputs, water use, improvements, crop failure, environmental responsibility, termination, and dispute resolution.