used to say:
“An oath involving divorce has no effect.”
I asked, “Did he regard it as an oath?”
He replied, “I do not know.”

Ibn Tāwūs thus reported that his father did not regard it as effecting divorce, while leaving undecided whether it constituted an oath requiring expiation, since it falls under vows concerning matters that are not acts of devotion. Whether such a declaration constitutes an oath is a well-known point of disagreement.

This is also the view of the Zāhirīs, such as Dāwūd and Abū Muhammad ibn Hazm, though their position rests on the view that neither conditional divorce nor conditional manumission takes effect. They differed concerning deferred divorce and manumission. This rests on the principle mentioned earlier: contracts are valid only when a text or consensus establishes their obligation or permissibility. Their position rests on “three premises” that are disputed:

“The first” is that the presumption regarding contracts is prohibition.

“The second” is that what is analogous in meaning to cases covered by the texts is not thereby rendered permissible.

“The third” is that deferred and conditional divorce do not fall within the general scope of the texts.

As for the previously mentioned reasoning—that this resembles a vow made in contention and anger—this follows by analogy from the position of those who permit expiation for vows made in contention and anger and distinguish devotional vows from vows made in anger. That distinction requires a corresponding distinction between a conditional declaration intended to take effect when its condition is fulfilled and a conditional declaration used as an oath, which is intended not to take effect—unless the aforementioned distinction is valid between making the actual occurrence conditional and making the obligation conditional. We shall discuss this.

We have already explained that this view can be derived from Ahmad’s principles in several ways mentioned earlier. It is likewise a necessary implication of the position of anyone who holds that a vow made in contention and anger entails an expiation