May a discretionary penalty take or destroy property?

In al-Hisba fi al-Islam, Ibn Taymiyya devotes a section to financial discretionary punishment, opening with the statement that punishment by financial penalties is lawful in specific cases: in the well-known view of Malik, in Ahmad's school - in some cases undisputed and in others disputed - and in one view of al-Shafi'i, though they differ on details. ¹ It is a question within discretionary punishment.

From the sunna he cites: permitting whoever finds a person hunting in the Medina sanctuary to take his gear; the order to break wine jars and slit wineskins; the order to Abd Allah ibn Umar to burn two saffron-dyed garments; the order at Khaybar to break the pots of donkey meat, then permission to pour them out and wash them instead - from which he infers that both were allowed, since the penalty was not obligatory; the demolition of the Mosque of Dirar; doubling the fine on one who steals what was not secured; and the reported burning of the goods of one who embezzled spoils. ¹ From the caliphs: Umar and Ali ordering places where wine was sold to be burned, taking half the wealth of one who withheld zakat, Uthman burning the copies of the Qur'an that differed from the master copy, and Umar ordering the burning of Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas's palace when Sa'd meant to screen himself from the people. ^{1 2}

Ibn Taymiyya says that whoever claimed financial penalties are abrogated and ascribed this without qualification to the followers of Malik and Ahmad misrepresented their schools, and whoever said it absolutely, of any school, spoke without evidence; that the Rightly Guided Caliphs and senior Companions applying them after the Prophet ﷺ's death shows they remain in force. ² He holds that in the schools of Malik and Ahmad financial penalties, like bodily ones, are either in accord with the law or contrary to it, and that those claiming abrogation have nothing but a claimed consensus on abandoning the practice - whereas no consensus on abandoning a text is known unless the abrogating text is known. ²

He divides the duties owed to God into three: acts of worship, penalties (fixed or discretionary) and expiations, each bodily, financial or mixed. ³ Financial penalties that remove a wrong are, like bodily ones, of three kinds: destruction, alteration and transfer of ownership to another. ³ Destruction includes breaking and burning idols, destroying musical instruments in the view of most jurists, breaking wine vessels and burning the wine shop, as Umar did with the shop of Ruwayshid al-Thaqafi; and Umar pouring away milk watered for sale. ^{3 4}

Ibn Taymiyya notes that some jurists holding this principle allowed destroying fraudulent manufactures such as badly woven cloth, and that destruction is not required in every case; that some ruled adulterated food be given to the poor, and some allowed this and disliked destroying it; he prefers charity, since it both deters the fraudster and benefits the poor, and explains that Umar destroyed the milk because in his time the poor in Medina were few or none. ⁴

The arguments of those who held abrogation, from their own books, and the rest of the section on alteration and transfer (pp. 53-57) are not given here.