Back to search

Has divorce occurred due to the wife's leaving the bedroom and sleeping outside it after the husband's oath that divorce would occur if she left the room and slept outside it?

1 min readAlso available in العربية

The fatwa we adopt is that if a man suspends his wife's divorce on a condition, the divorce takes effect when the condition is met, regardless of whether he intended to enact the divorce, or merely to threaten, emphasize, or prevent something.

Therefore, according to the fatwa, if you break your oath, your wife is divorced. However, it appears that you have not broken your oath, because your wife did not deliberately sleep outside the room; rather, her eyes simply overcame her. The preponderant view with us in such a situation is that the oath is not broken.

Ibn al-Qayyim said in "I'lam al-Muwaqqi'in": "What is befitting of Ahmad's rules and principles is that one does not break an oath in a situation of inability, whether that inability is due to a legal impediment or a cosmic, divinely ordained impediment, just as is his saying concerning a situation where the inability is due to coercion."

Similarly, the oath is not broken if she did the suspended act by way of interpretation. Some scholars have also held that the oath is not broken if the sworn-upon act occurs unintentionally due to ignorance or forgetfulness.

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

Read the full answer on Ftawy