, the matter was studied after reviewing the paper submitted by the General Secretariat of the Council of Senior Scholars and prepared by the Permanent Committee for Scholarly Research and Legal Rulings.

After examining the issue, exchanging views, surveying the statements of the scholars on the subject, and discussing the objections raised against each opinion—while bearing in mind that no explicit text exists in either the Book of Allah or the Sunnah of His Messenger ﷺ that definitively rules a conditional divorce to be effective or ineffective upon violation of the condition, and that the question is therefore theoretical and open to ijtihad—the Council, by majority vote, resolved to adopt the view that divorce does indeed take effect once the condition to which it was suspended is fulfilled, whether the husband’s intent in attaching the condition was pure divorce, exhortation, deterrence, confirmation of a report, or its denial. The most significant grounds for this decision are as follows:

1 – The reports transmitted from the Companions and the Successors. Among them is what al-Bukhari recorded in his Sahih, in categorical form: a man said to his wife, “You are absolutely divorced if you go out,” whereupon Ibn ʿUmar ruled, “If she goes out, she is irrevocably separated from him; if she does not go out, nothing takes place.” Al-Bayhaqi likewise narrated with his chain from Ibn Masʿud concerning a man who said to his wife, “If you do such-and-such you are divorced,” and she did it; Ibn Masʿud said, “That counts as one divorce, and he has the stronger right to take her back.” Al-Bayhaqi also transmitted, through Abu al-Zinad from his father, that the seven jurists of Medina used to say: “Any man who tells his wife, ‘You are divorced if you leave before night,’ and she leaves, then his wife is divorced.” There are other traditions as well, each lending support to the others.

2 – The consensus of the scholars—save a lone dissenter—that a divorce pronounced in jest is effective, even though the speaker clearly did not intend divorce. This rests on the hadith of Abu Hurayrah and others, universally accepted by the ummah: “Three matters, whether spoken in earnest or in jest, are binding: divorce, marriage, and manumission.” Both the joker and the one who swears an oath by divorce have deliberately directed their hearts toward the wording of divorce, even though they did not intend its consequence; therefore there is no basis for differentiating between them by deeming it binding only in the case of the joker