and solemn pledges impose upon him a second obligation, distinct from the obligation established by the original command alone. The act is thus obligatory on two grounds, so that whoever neglects it deserves both the punishment due to someone who breaks covenants and solemn pledges and the punishment due to someone who disobeys Allah and His Messenger. This is the correct analysis. Some scholars of our school maintain that when someone vows to perform an obligatory act, its status after the vow remains as it was before, unlike a vow to perform a recommended act. This is incorrect. If a vow makes a recommended act obligatory, then it has even greater reason to impose an obligation to perform an already obligatory act. This is not a matter of bringing about what already exists; rather, these are two different kinds of obligation, each with its own distinct ruling. An example is a grandmother who is both the mother of one’s maternal grandmother and the mother of one’s paternal grandmother: she has two grounds of entitlement, each of which entitles her to one-sixth.

The same applies to those scholars of our school who say that conditions inherent in a contract cannot validly be stipulated, or that they become invalid (1). Some scholars of al-Shāfiʿī’s school have even said that if someone says, “I give her to you in marriage on the terms Allah has commanded: retaining her honorably or releasing her with kindness,” the marriage is invalid because he has stipulated divorce within it. This is profoundly unsound. The obligations arising from contracts become binding precisely because the contracting parties impose them upon themselves. A contract stated without qualification has an understood meaning; when the parties conclude it without qualification, they thereby bind themselves to what it is understood to entail. What a contract entails becomes obligatory through the contract itself, just as what a vow entails becomes obligatory through the vow. The Lawgiver did not impose it as an obligation in the first instance; rather, He commanded the fulfillment of contracts, just as He commanded the fulfillment of vows.

Thus, when a contract entails a known obligation, whether understood from its unqualified wording or established by custom, and the contracting parties expressly impose that obligation through specific wording, this amounts to joining the specific to the general. Thus the contracting party