Chapter on Oaths in Legal Claims
No oath is administered regarding acts of worship or the prescribed punishments of Allah. The defendant who denies a claim is required to swear an oath concerning every right owed to another person, except marriage, divorce, restoration of marriage, abstention from marital relations by oath, the original establishment of ownership as a slave, the right of emancipation-based patronage, a slave-woman’s bearing a child to her master, lineage, retaliation for homicide or bodily injury, and false accusation of unlawful sexual intercourse, …
His statement: “Oaths.” We have previously explained that an oath is the affirmation of something by mentioning one who is held in reverence, using a specific formula. Thus, yamīn (oath), ḥalf (swearing), qasam (oath), īlāʾ (an oath of marital abstinence), and similar terms all have one meaning: affirming something by mentioning one who is held in reverence in a particular formula, such as, “By Allah,” and the like.
His statement: “Legal claims.” This is the plural of daʿwā (claim), which is when a person asserts, against someone else, that something belongs to him. It is the opposite of an acknowledgment, for an acknowledgment is when a person admits that something belongs to someone else at his own expense. Testimony is when a person establishes something in favor of another against a third party. A claim, then, is when a person asserts something for himself against another, saying, “So-and-so owes me such-and-such.”
The purpose of this chapter is to explain the claims in which an oath is administered and those in which it is not. The general principle is that an oath is administered concerning the rights of other people, whereas it is not administered concerning the rights of Allah. This is because rights owed to people involve an opposing party—the person concerned—who may need to clear himself when he is the defendant and denies the claim, or the claimant may need to strengthen his case when he has a witness. Thus, an oath is needed either for exoneration or for strengthening the claim.
But when the right is not owed to another person, no oath is administered concerning it, nor do we adjudicate it, because this right is between the person and his Lord. Rather, we instruct him. If he says that he has done it or omitted it, we do not require him to swear an oath, because a right owed to another person may be adjudicated on the basis of refusal to swear, whereas a right of Allah is not adjudicated on that basis. Thus, if a person were told, “Swear that you have paid your zakah,” and he said: