in every respect. The former entered into a marriage contract that he did not truly intend, seeking only to terminate it; the latter effected an annulment that he did not truly intend, seeking only to undo it. This is a recently devised, feeble stratagem. Abū Abd Allāh ibn Batta wrote a treatise refuting it and cited reports from the early generations on the matter, some of which I have mentioned elsewhere.

The third stratagem: When no stratagem can be devised concerning the act sworn about, they devise one concerning that by which the oath was sworn, seeking to invalidate it by scrutinizing its conditions. Thus, some later followers of al-Shāfiī took to investigating how the marriage contract had been concluded, hoping that it might contain something rendering it invalid, so that they could then maintain that divorce does not take effect within an invalid marriage. According to one of al-Shāfiī’s two opinions and one of the two reports from Ahmad, a marriage contracted by a morally corrupt guardian is invalid. Since moral corruption is prevalent among many people, this doctrine found a ready market as a means of circumventing divorce oaths. I have even seen someone write an entire work on this issue for the express purpose of using it as a stratagem to prevent divorce from taking effect.

Yet those who resort to this stratagem examine the circumstances in which the marriage was contracted and the invalidity of a morally corrupt guardian’s authority only when divorce is pronounced—even though many scholars, if not most of them, hold that divorce generally takes effect in an invalid marriage. By contrast, when it comes to intercourse and sexual enjoyment—which Muslims unanimously agree are not rendered lawful by an invalid marriage—they give the matter no consideration. Nor do they consider it in matters of inheritance or any other legal consequence of a valid marriage. Rather, they consider it only when divorce is at issue. This is a form of making a mockery of Allah’s signs and scheming against them. It was occasioned solely by swearing an oath of divorce and the necessity of preventing that divorce from taking effect.

The fourth stratagem: the Surayjian device, which likewise invalidates that by which the oath was sworn, but