Thus, this type resembles an exchange in a sale or lease. The same applies when a man makes divorce a punishment for his wife, as when he says, “If you strike my mother, you are divorced,” or, “If you leave the house, you are divorced.” In compensated divorce, he gives her a divorce in return for money, because she desires divorce; here, he gives her divorce in return for [her disobedience].

As for the second category, an example is a man saying to his wife, “When you become ritually pure, you are divorced”; or to his slave, “When I die, you are free,” or, “When the year comes round, you are free,” or, “My wealth shall be given in charity.” This and similar declarations are conditional only in that they designate a time. This type is equivalent to an immediately effective declaration insofar as each speaker intends the divorce or manumission but merely postpones it until the specified time. It is like deferring a debt, or like someone who delays pronouncing divorce from one time to another for some purpose served by the delay—not in return for consideration and not as an oath intended to make a demand or affirm a report.

Hence, jurists among our own school and others have said: If a man swears that he will not swear by divorce—for example, by saying, “By Allah, I will not swear by divorcing you,” or, “If I swear by divorcing you, my slave is free,” or, “then you are divorced”—[then], if he says, “If you enter,” or, “If you do not enter,” or anything similar that conveys inducement or prohibition, he has sworn an oath. If, however, it is a purely conditional declaration, such as, “When the sun rises, you are divorced,” or, “You are divorced if the sun rises,” the jurists differed concerning it. The followers of al-Shāfiī said that he has not sworn an oath, whereas the followers of Abū Hanīfa and the Qādī in al-Jāmi said that he has.

As for the third category—where he intends both of them to occur—an example is: