expiation for an oath. What, then, would their position be regarding divorce, which is the most hateful of permissible things to Allah? Could it be supposed that the Companions, may Allah be pleased with them, would say that someone who swears an oath involving acts of obedience beloved to Allah—such as prayer, fasting, charity, and pilgrimage—is not obliged to perform those acts, and that expiation for an oath suffices, yet say that something Allah does not love, but rather hates, becomes binding upon whoever swears an oath involving it?

The Muslims agree that swearing an oath involving disbelief or Islam does not thereby make someone a disbeliever or a Muslim. Thus, if someone says, “If I do such-and-such, I am a Jew,” and then does it, he does not become a Jew, by agreement. Whether he must offer expiation for an oath is subject to “two views.”

“The first” is that he must. This is the position of Abū Hanīfa and the well-known position reported from Ahmad. “The second” is that he need not. This is the position of Mālik and al-Shāfiʿī, and one position reported from Ahmad. Some followers of Abū Hanīfa held that if someone believes that breaking his oath would make him a disbeliever and nevertheless swears such an oath, he becomes a disbeliever. They said, “Because he has chosen disbelief.”

The majority, however, said that he does not become a disbeliever, because his intention is to avoid falling into disbelief: he swore the oath precisely because of his hatred of it. Likewise, whoever swears an oath involving divorce or anything else intends only to avoid its becoming binding upon him, because of his intense aversion to it.

On this basis, the majority distinguished between a “vow of devotion” and a “vow made in obstinacy and anger.” They explained that, in the former, the person intends both the condition and its stipulated consequence to occur, unlike the latter. Thus, if he says, “If Allah heals