Answer:

None of the early generations of this community or its imams issued a ruling endorsing this doctrine: neither the Companions, nor the Successors, nor the imams of the established schools—Abū Hanīfa, Mālik, al-Shāfiʿī and Ahmad—nor their contemporary disciples, such as Abū Yūsuf, Muhammad, al-Muzanī, al-Buwaytī, Ibn al-Qāsim, Ibn Wahb, Ibrāhīm al-Harbī, Abū Bakr al-Athram, Abū Dāwūd and others. None of them issued such a ruling. Only a group of later jurists endorsed it, and the majority of the Muslim community rejected their position, including the followers of Abū Hanīfa, Mālik and Ahmad, and many followers of al-Shāfiʿī. Al-Ghazālī initially upheld it, but later retracted his position and demonstrated its invalidity. It is well established in the religion of the Muslims that Muslim marriage cannot be like Christian marriage.

The circularity they imagined here is unfounded. They assumed that if the unconditional divorce took effect, the conditional divorce would also take effect. Yet the latter would take effect only if the condition were valid, whereas the condition is invalid because it entails something impossible under Islamic law: a divorce taking effect after having been preceded by three divorces. This is impossible under Islamic law, and since the Surayjī device entails this legal impossibility, it is invalid.

If a man has sworn an oath involving divorce, believing that he would not break his oath, and later discovers that this is impermissible, he should keep his wife. No divorce takes effect on account of what has already occurred, and he must repent going forward.

In sum, if a man says to his wife, “If I divorce you, you are divorced three times before it,” and then divorces her, the unconditional divorce takes effect according to the stronger view, while the conditional divorce does not take effect alongside it. For if the conditional divorce—which consists of three divorces—were to take effect, the unconditional divorce would not take effect, since it would exceed the permitted number of divorces. And if the unconditional divorce does not take effect,