or similar rights. The other woman therefore neither competes with her for these rights nor remains her co-wife, and her consent is not required for him to marry that woman. Ordinarily, a man seeks to please a woman by giving up another wife for her only while she remains his wife. Once their marriage has been irrevocably dissolved, he no longer seeks to please her. How much more so when he has divorced her three times—the utmost way of displeasing her! How could someone who has displeased her in this way intend to please her in a lesser matter? Such considerations, together with people’s customary practice, show that he placed the other wife’s marital status in her hands only for as long as the woman entrusted with this power remained his wife. Once she is no longer his wife, she has no authority over the other woman’s marital status.

All this assumes that the condition is regarded as binding. If it is not binding, it is as though he had simply said to her, without any prior stipulation, “The power to divorce yourself is in your hands,” or, “The power to divorce so-and-so is in your hands.” He may revoke this authorization. In the case presented, however, this was stipulated in the marriage contract. The Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—said:

“The conditions you are most bound to fulfill are those by which marital intimacy becomes lawful for you.”

Al-Bukhārī and Muslim both recorded this in their Sahīh collections. Accordingly, groups of earlier and later scholars—including ‘Amr ibn al-‘Ās, Hammād ibn Zayd, Tāwūs, al-Awzā‘ī, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, and others—held that if a husband undertakes, as a condition of marriage, not to marry another woman alongside his wife, the condition is valid. If he then marries another woman, his wife has the option of ending her marriage. This is more far-reaching than stipulating that, should he marry another woman, the power to divorce that wife will be in her hands; yet her aim is the same. In both cases, she has this choice only for as long as she remains his wife.