Abū Jaʿfar Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Mughīth said in his book entitled The Sufficient Guide to the Principles of Legal Documents and the Elucidation of Their Subtleties:

“An innovated divorce is for a man to pronounce three divorces upon his wife in a single utterance. If he does so, the divorce is binding upon him. The scholars, while agreeing that he has pronounced a divorce, then differed: how many divorces take effect?

“Ali ibn Abī Tālib and Ibn Masʿūd, may Allah be pleased with them both, said that only one divorce takes effect. Ibn Abbās, may Allah be pleased with him and his father, held the same view. This is because saying ‘three times’ has no significance, since he has not divorced her on three occasions. If he were reporting what had happened previously and said, ‘I divorced her three times,’ reporting three divorces that he had pronounced in three separate acts, that would be correct. But if he had divorced her only once and then said, ‘I divorced her three times,’ he would be lying.

“Similarly, if he swore by Allah three times, repeating the oath, these would be three oaths. But if he swore by Allah, saying, ‘I swear by Allah three times,’ he would have sworn only one oath. The same applies to divorce.”

He said: “Al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwām and Abd al-Rahmān ibn Awf held the same view. We have transmitted all of this from Ibn Waddāh”—meaning Imam Muhammad ibn Waddāh, who studied under scholars of the generation of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Ibn Abī Shayba, Yahyā ibn Maʿīn, Sahnūn ibn Saʿīd, and their contemporaries.

He said: “Among the scholars of Cordoba who held this view were Ibn Zinbāʿ, a rightly guided shaykh; Muhammad ibn Abd al-Salām al-Husaynī, the leading jurist of his age; Ibn Baqī ibn Makhlad; Asbagh ibn al-Habbāb; and a number of other jurists of Cordoba.” He also attributed this view to more than ten devout jurists of Toledo who followed the school of Mālik ibn Anas.

I say: Al-Tilimsānī mentioned it as a view reported from Mālik. It is also the position of Muhammad ibn Muqātil al-Rāzī, one of the leading Hanafī scholars. He related it from al-Māzinī and others. This has also been mentioned as a view reported from