How many calamities, evils, suicides, and broken households plague societies that forbid divorce! The Almighty has permitted it and laid down regulations that secure benefit and avert harm, as is His way in all His majestic legislation, which gathers both immediate and future welfare. Praise be to Allah for His grace and generosity.

The person who is qualified to effect a divorce is the discerning, free-acting husband who understands what he is saying, or his authorized agent, for the Prophet ﷺ said: “Innamā at-ṭalāqu liman akhadha bi’s-sāq” (Divorce is only for the one who has taken hold of the leg).

As for anyone whose mind is absent with a valid excuse—such as the insane, the unconscious, the sleeper, one afflicted by an illness that removes awareness (like delirium), or a person compelled to drink an intoxicant, or placed under anesthesia and the like for medical treatment—none of their divorces is effective if uttered while the mind is absent for any of those reasons. The Prophet ﷺ said, “Every divorce is valid except the divorce of the mentally incompetent,” a report cited by al-Bukhari in his Ṣaḥīḥ. Moreover, intellect is the foundation of legal responsibility.

If the loss of reason is the result of voluntarily consuming an intoxicant, and he then pronounces divorce in that state, scholars differ. One view—adopted by the four imams and many other jurists—is that the divorce does take effect.

However, when a man is wrongfully compelled to pronounce divorce and does so only to remove the coercion and injustice, the divorce is not valid.