and the jurists. It is the position of al-Shāfiʿī and Ahmad, one of the two positions within the school of Abū Hanīfah, and one position within the school of Mālik.

The response is:

Here, he intended both the condition and its consequence, just as the other person intended a vow of devotion. Just as he distinguishes, in vows contingent upon conditions, between cases in which fulfilment of the conditions is intended and those in which their nonfulfilment is intended, the same distinction applies here. All these cases belong to a single category: rulings contingent upon conditions. If religious law, or reason and custom, distinguish—in rulings contingent upon conditions expressed in language—between what is intended to occur and what is intended not to occur, as the Companions and the majority of jurists agree, then the two cannot be treated alike.

The argument based on divorce for compensation and contractual manumission is appropriate only against those who reject conditional divorce altogether, as is the position of Ibn Hazm and the Imāmiyyah, or some of them. They maintain that divorce contingent upon a condition never takes effect, because they recognize as effective only such divorce as is established to have been authorized by the Lawgiver.

They say:

It has not been established that He authorized this.

They do not accept analogical reasoning. They have also treated the reports from the Companions and Successors concerning oaths by divorce and emancipation as evidence for their position. Yet these reports do not support their position. What is reported from Tāwūs is that he did not consider an oath by divorce to have any effect. This does not entail that he held divorce contingent upon conditions to be ineffective in every case. Rather, he may distinguish between a condition whose fulfilment is intended and one whose nonfulfilment is intended, just as this is the position of Tāwūs, ʿAtāʾ, and others concerning “vows of contention and anger.”