What has most often led people into these practices, and prompted jurists so frequently both to denounce them and to devise them, is people’s swearing oaths of divorce and believing that divorce inevitably takes effect when such an oath is broken. Indeed, the Kufan jurists and others have elaborated a great many subsidiary rulings concerning oaths on this basis. Many of the weak subsidiary rulings developed by these jurists and others like them resemble the example that Shaykh Abū Muhammad al-Maqdisī—may Allah have mercy on him—used to give: a man builds a fine house upon stones wrongfully taken from someone else. When his ownership of those foundation stones is challenged and another person’s right to them is established, his building collapses. For even well-crafted subsidiary rulings are of no benefit unless they rest upon sound foundations.

If, then, swearing oaths of divorce and believing that divorce necessarily takes effect when the oath is broken have brought about these tremendous evils—which have altered certain aspects of Islam among those who engage in these practices, so that they have come to resemble the People of the Book, as the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, foretold—even though the binding effect of divorce when invoked in an oath is found neither in Allah’s Book nor in His Messenger’s Sunnah; nor did the Companions of Allah’s Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, issue such a ruling—not a single one of them, so far as I know; nor did those who followed them in righteousness and the scholars after them agree upon it; nor does it accord with the foundations of Islamic law; and those who maintain it have no argument beyond an established practice founded upon an analogy reinforced by adherence to certain imams, scholars esteemed by the Muslim community—and, praise be to Allah, their stature is greater still than people suppose, but in cases of disagreement we have been commanded only to refer matters back to Allah and the Messenger, and they have been opposed by others no less distinguished than themselves, indeed their equals or superiors—then we have already cited reports from leading Companions