He would have granted him relief and a way out.” This can only be said to someone who knew that the act was forbidden and nevertheless committed it. Someone unaware of its prohibition, however, deserves no punishment and is not considered a transgressor, for once he learns that it is forbidden, he repents, turns away from repeating it, and commits himself not to do it.

Those whose triple divorces the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, counted as one during his lifetime used to repent. Likewise, those who divorced during menstruation, as Ibn Umar did, used to repent and thus become among those who fear Allah. Whoever does not repent wrongs himself, as Allah says:

“How evil is the name of disobedience after faith! And whoever does not repent—it is they who are the wrongdoers.”

He thus confines wrongdoing to those who do not repent. Whoever repents is not a wrongdoer and therefore is not to be regarded as transgressing Allah’s limits. Rather, his pronouncement is as though it had never been made. As for someone who does not repent, his case is open to scholarly judgment. Umar punished them by holding them to their divorces, and there was no resort to marriages contrived to make their former wives lawful to them again. Believing that their wives would become forbidden to them, they refrained from forbidden divorce and were thereby deterred from transgressing Allah’s limits.

But if they begin pronouncing forbidden divorces and then taking their wives back through forbidden marriages contrived to make them lawful again, they commit what is forbidden twice and transgress Allah’s limits twice—indeed, three times, even four. For the first husband’s divorce was a transgression of Allah’s limits, as were the marriage of the man who makes her lawful again and his intercourse with her. Through this, the curse has fallen upon him