the Companions—together with the indication of the Quran and the corroboration of established principles—establish its prohibition and invalidity. Furthermore, the intervening marriage has spawned harms known only to Allah, some of which we have noted in our book, “[An Exposition of] the Evidence Establishing the Invalidity of the Intervening Marriage.” What most often drives people to resort to such a marriage is swearing oaths that invoke divorce. Otherwise, a man will generally not pronounce a threefold divorce unless he intends to do so; and one who intends it does not suffer the same regret and harm as one who is forced to let it take effect because he needs to violate his oath.

These five corrupt practices—devising stratagems to break oaths and strip them of their understood meaning and intended purpose; resorting to a khulʿ dissolution and then renewing the marriage; seeking grounds on which the marriage may be deemed invalid; devising means to prevent the divorce from taking effect; and resorting to an intervening marriage arranged to make remarriage lawful—involve such scheming, deception, mockery of Allah’s signs, and trifling as repels rational people from Allah’s religion and gives disbelievers grounds to assail it, as I have seen in some writings by Christians and others. It is evident to every believer of sound natural disposition that Islam is innocent of and utterly above these absurdities, which resemble the stratagems of the Jews and the impostures of monks. It is also evident that the chief cause leading people into these practices—and prompting jurists both to condemn them so often and to devise them—has been people’s swearing oaths that invoke divorce and their belief that divorce inevitably takes effect when such an oath is violated. Indeed, the Kufan jurists and others developed a great many subsidiary rulings concerning oaths on the basis of this principle. Many of the tenuous subsidiary rulings developed by these scholars and their peers are, as Shaykh Abū Muhammad al-Maqdisī used to say, like this: “They are like a man who built a fine house upon wrongfully seized stones. Then his right to those stones forming its foundation was disputed, and they were adjudged to belong to someone else: