Wednesday, 29 April 2026 (12 Dhuʻl-Qiʻdah 1447 AH)
Question: A man said to his wife: “If you do not enter the house today, you are divorced.” She was at her family’s home, so she immediately got up and went to her husband’s house. The husband, however, had locked the house and gone out, forgetting he had done so. The woman arrived to find the house closed and locked; she returned to her family’s home. The husband came to his house at Maghrib, found the door locked, remembered the matter, and went to his wife; he learned she had come intending to return, and that the locking of the door had prevented her. The husband regretted what occurred. What is the ruling?
Answer—and Allah is the One who grants success and aid: What appears to me is that divorce does not take effect, for several reasons:
1. The husband intended from his wife only that she do what was in her power. This is unlike the divorce of one who says to his wife: “If you do not ascend to the sky today, you are divorced”—for that one has suspended divorce upon what is impossible for his wife, and divorce takes effect there, unlike the first case.
2. The people of the madhhab said: a person does not break his oath unless the time elapses while he is able to fulfill or break it. Here, the woman was not able.
3. They said: oaths are carried upon intention and are interpreted by it—even if their outward wording is general.
If the husband was angry with his wife for her desire to remain with her family and spend the night there, and he swore by divorce, “If you do not enter my house today [you are divorced],” then his oath in that circumstance was because of her insistence on spending the evening with her family. If she leaves that insistence, departs her family’s home intending to return to the house, but then finds it locked due to her husband’s absence the whole day—then divorce does not fall upon her in that case, because the husband did not will divorce in that state, nor intend it.
Thus, his intention was directed toward the purpose upon which he suspended divorce, and that purpose did not occur. In the ḥadīth: “Actions are only by intentions, and every person shall have only what he intended…” and “No act [is valid] except with intention…”
Yes: what we have stated is the madhhab, as in al-Azhar. There it says, in the course of discussing divorce suspended upon a condition: “A time-bound oath is broken by the elapsing of its end while one is able to fulfill or break it and did not do so.” And in the marginal notes: “The preferred view is that ability is necessary.”
His words in al-Azhar—“able to fulfill and break”—revert to the one who suspends and to the one time-bounding; there is no impediment to their reversion to both… (it has been established) (Í). End of the marginal note.
Source : Min Thimār al-ʿIlm wa al-Ḥikmah vol.1