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Does divorce take effect if Facebook is opened, despite the husband's approval on condition of changing the email, after he swore by divorce not to open it?

1 min readAlso available in العربية

The authoritative fatwa according to us is that whoever makes his wife's divorce conditional upon a condition cannot retract it, and if the condition is met, the wife is divorced. This is the view of most scholars. Some scholars, like Ibn Taymiyyah, are of the opinion that whoever intends to effect a divorce can retract the conditional divorce, but if he did not intend to effect a divorce, and only intended to threaten, emphasize, or prevent, then divorce does not occur, but he must pay an expiation for a broken oath.

Accordingly, if the husband intended to prevent you from opening Facebook absolutely, then the authoritative fatwa according to us is that he cannot retract this condition, and if you open Facebook, divorce occurs.

However, if he intended to prevent you from opening Facebook only in a specific way (such as preventing you from accessing it from the same email account but not others), then in this case, divorce does not occur if you access it through a new email account; because the intention in an oath specifies the general meaning.

It is advisable to present the matter to trustworthy scholars for further detail.

Summarized from the full answer at Ftawy · reviewed Sep 2, 2026

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