his building collapsed. For those fine subsidiary rulings are of no benefit unless they rest upon firmly established principles.”

Given that swearing oaths invoking divorce, and believing that divorce inevitably takes effect when such an oath is violated, have caused these immense evils—distorting certain aspects of Islam among those who engage in them and causing them to resemble the People of the Book, just as the Prophet (may Allah bless him and grant him peace) foretold—even though the position that divorce takes effect when invoked in an oath is found neither in the Book of Allah nor in the Sunnah of His Messenger; was not given as a legal opinion by the Companions of Allah’s Messenger (may Allah bless him and grant him peace), nor, to my knowledge, by even one of them; was not unanimously accepted by the Followers who succeeded them in righteousness, nor by the scholars after them; and does not accord with the principles of the Sharia—the proponents of this position have no proof beyond an entrenched practice founded upon analogy and reinforced by adherence to the views of a group of leading scholars held in high esteem by the Muslim community. They are—praise be to Allah—even more worthy than the high regard in which they are held. Yet when disputes arise, we have been commanded only to refer matters back to Allah and His Messenger. Moreover, those who disagreed with them on this issue were no less eminent, but were their equals or even their superiors.

We have already related that prominent Companions—such as ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿUmar, whose authority, jurisprudence, and piety are unanimously acknowledged; his sister Hafsa, Mother of the Believers; and Zaynab, the stepdaughter of Allah’s Messenger (may Allah bless him and grant him peace), who was among the most accomplished jurists of the female Companions—gave the legal opinion that an oath invoking manumission requires expiation, and an oath invoking divorce has an even stronger claim to that ruling. We have also related that Tāwūs, one of the most eminent scholars among the Followers in knowledge, jurisprudence, and piety, did not hold that an oath invoking divorce caused divorce to take effect.

Given that divorce taking effect upon the violation of an oath invoking it entails these evils, and given that its standing in the Sharia is as just described, this indicates that whatever leads to such corruption was prescribed neither by Allah nor by His Messenger, as we have pointed out in