what some writers on jurisprudence [devised], calling it the chapter of legal riddles and the chapter of stratagems concerning oaths. Most of it consists of practices necessarily known in the religion to be impermissible, and the oath-taker’s words may not be construed in those ways. This is why the leading scholars—such as Ahmad and others—vehemently denounced those who resorted to stratagems regarding these oaths.

The second stratagem: When no stratagem can be contrived through the wording concerning the matter sworn to, they devise one concerning the act itself. They direct the man to arrange a khulʿ separation from his wife so that he may perform the act sworn about while they are irrevocably separated. This stratagem is more recent than the preceding one, and I believe it arose around the third century AH. Stratagems generally originated with some of the people of Kufa, but the khulʿ stratagem does not accord with their legal principles. They hold that if he performs the act during the waiting period, the divorce takes effect as a result, because a woman observing her waiting period after an [irrevocable] separation remains subject to divorce according to them. A person resorting to this stratagem must therefore wait until the waiting period expires and then perform the act sworn about [after it has ended]. This harms him because of the protracted delay.

Some of al-Shāfiʿī’s followers therefore began issuing fatwas endorsing it. At times, they combined it with one of his two opinions, which accords with the better-known of the two reports from Ahmad: namely, that khulʿ constitutes an annulment rather than a divorce. Accordingly, whenever [the oath-taker] wished to break his oath, he would separate from his wife by khulʿ, perform the act sworn about, and then marry her anew. They would then either rule that this reduced the number of divorces available to him or that it did not.

This khulʿ—which is khulʿ used to circumvent oaths—is akin to a muhallil marriage (an intervening marriage intended to make remarriage to the former husband lawful)