because an impediment exists, not because a condition is lacking. Abū al-Abbās ibn Surayj and a group of scholars after him held that if a man said to his wife, “If a divorce pronounced by me takes effect against you, or if I divorce you, then you are divorced three times before it,” no divorce would ever thereafter take effect against her. Their reasoning was that if the immediately effective divorce took effect, the conditional divorce would necessarily take effect; yet if the conditional divorce took effect, the immediately effective divorce could not. Its taking effect would therefore entail its not taking effect, and so it does not take effect.

The great majority of Muslim jurists from every school rejected this. Indeed, they regarded it as one of those errors necessarily known to have no place in the religion of Islam, for it is necessarily known from the religion of Muhammad, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, that divorce is legally sanctioned in every marriage and that there is no marriage in which divorce is impossible.

The cause of their error was that they deemed the following proposition valid: if the immediately effective divorce takes effect, the conditional divorce also takes effect. But this proposition is unsound, for it entails the occurrence of a divorce preceded by three divorces, and such a divorce is impossible under the Sacred Law. Any statement containing such a provision is invalid. Since it is invalid, the immediately effective divorce does not necessitate the occurrence of the conditional divorce, for that consequence would follow only if the condition were valid.

They then differed as to whether all three divorces specified in the conditional pronouncement take effect, or whether the condition is invalid and only the immediately effective divorce takes effect. There are two opinions on this within the schools of al-Shāfiī, Ahmad, and others.

I do not know whether Ibn Surayj introduced this issue as a stratagem for nullifying divorce, or whether he stated it merely as the consistent application of an analogy he believed to be valid, after which those who came after him employed it as a stratagem. I have, however, seen a work by one of the later scholars who lived after the fifth century, devoted to this issue, whose purpose was to use it as a stratagem to prevent divorce from taking effect. This is why they worded it as follows: “If a divorce pronounced by me takes effect against you, then you are divorced three times before it.” For if he were to say, “If I divorce you, then you are divorced three times [before it],” this