had to pronounce the words of Islam together with his wife, matching her phrase for phrase; such a case never occurred at all. Indeed, the Prophet ﷺ restored his daughter Zaynab to her husband Abū al-ʿĀṣ ibn al-Rabīʿ even though he only embraced Islam at the time of the Treaty of Ḥudaybiyyah, whereas she had become Muslim at the very dawn of the mission, so more than eighteen years separated their two conversions.

As for the statement, “There were six years between her Islam and his,” this is a mistake; what was meant is that six years passed between her emigration and his acceptance of Islam.

The divine prohibition of Muslim women for polytheists—“they are not lawful for them, nor are the disbelievers lawful for them” (Qur’an 60:10)—was revealed only after Ḥudaybiyyah. When that ruling came down, Abū al-ʿĀṣ accepted Islam and she was returned to him.

Basing the matter on the duration of the ʿidda (waiting period) is supported by neither scriptural text nor consensus. Plainly, if embracing Islam in itself annulled the marriage, the annulment would be final and irrevocable, not revocable; the ʿidda would then serve only to bar her from marrying someone else, not to preserve the former union. As for making the separation immediate or tying it to the ʿidda, we know of no occasion on which the Messenger of Allah ﷺ ruled in either of those two ways, despite the many men who accepted Islam during his lifetime.

This view is one of the two reports from Imām Aḥmad and was preferred by al-Khallāl, Abū Bakr ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, Ibn al-Mundhir, Ibn Ḥazm, Ḥammād, Saʿīd ibn Jubayr, ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, al-Shaʿbī, and others; earlier we noted that it was also the choice of Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah—may Allah have mercy on them all.

Shaykh ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Saʿdī concluded from the evidence that if one spouse embraces Islam while the other lags behind, then should the latter accept Islam during the ʿidda, the marriage remains intact. If the ʿidda expires, the wife is free to marry someone else; yet if she does not remarry and the husband later becomes Muslim, desires her, and she chooses him, she returns to him without a new contract.

Shaykh Taqī al-Dīn said: If a husband apostasises and does not come back to Islam until his wife’s ʿidda has ended, she becomes irrevocably separated from him according to the four imams, and if he were to divorce her thereafter, such a divorce would not—