Book of Oaths and Vows
Chapter: On Oaths Taken in the Name of Allah
In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. May blessings and peace be upon our master Muḥammad, his family, and his Companions in abundant measure.
Chapter: On Oaths Taken in the Name of Allah
In Mālik’s view, oaths that invoke Allah fall into three kinds. Two of them carry no liability for expiation:
- the laghw (inadvertent oath), and
- the ghamūs (deliberate false oath).
The laghw is when a person swears about a past or present matter while believing himself to be truthful, only to discover later that the reality was otherwise—for example, swearing that a distant man is a certain person and then learning it was someone else, or swearing that a bird is a crow and then realizing it is not.
In his Muwaṭṭaʾ, Mālik also transmits from ʿĀʾishah an indication that laghw includes every utterance in which a person does not actually intend to establish an oath: sayings that slip into one’s speech such as “No, by Allah,” or “Yes, by Allah,” when no oath is meant.
Both interpretations have been adopted by groups of scholars—people of Madinah and others among the early generations as well as leading muftis in the various Muslim lands—and