“The Fifth Stratagem”

If divorce takes effect and no stratagem is possible concerning either the words or deeds covered by the oath, or the divorce invoked in it—whether by invalidating it or preventing it from taking effect—they resort to a stratagem to restore the marriage through a “tahlīl marriage”: a marriage arranged to make the woman lawful again for her former husband. The Sunnah and the consensus of the Companions, together with the evidence of the Quran and the corroboration of established legal principles, demonstrate that such a marriage is forbidden and invalid. Moreover, tahlīl marriages have given rise to evils whose extent Allah alone knows. We have drawn attention to some of them in the book Iqāmat al-Dalīl ‘alā Butlān al-Tahlīl (Establishing the Proof of the Invalidity of Tahlīl Marriage).

What most often drives people to resort to tahlīl marriage is swearing oaths of divorce. Otherwise, a man generally pronounces a threefold divorce only when he intends it. Someone who intends it does not experience the same regret and harm as someone whose need to break his oath forces the divorce upon him.

These, then, are the “five evils”: contriving ways to break oaths and strip them of their meaning and purpose; resorting to khulʿ (divorce by compensation) and then renewing the marriage; searching for grounds on which the marriage was invalid; contriving to prevent divorce from taking effect; and resorting to tahlīl marriage.

These practices involve scheming, deception, mockery of Allah’s revelations, and frivolity that repel rational people from the religion of Islam and give unbelievers grounds to attack it, as I have seen in some Christian writings and elsewhere. Every believer whose innate disposition is sound can plainly see that the religion of Islam is innocent of, and far above, these absurd contrivances, which resemble the stratagems of the Jews and the trickery of monks.