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Fatwa CenterPronouncing divorce with intention of something else
Question
Allah bless you. One of my wives was pressuring me to divorce my other wife. She said she would stay with me if my other wife forfeited her nights. In our conversation, I said, "If she doesn't agree to those terms, then she is divorced". However, I may have meant by it not a performative speech act but a declaration of what I would say to my other wife; in other words, "I will say to her that if she does not agree to those terms, then she is divorced." In fact, I'm not sure of the words I used because it was so long ago. Nonetheless, I went home and told my wife not to show any non-agreement to the terms for fear that the divorce would take place. One night, she was angry or sad and said or implied that she did not agree to forfeiting her nights. I have treated that as a divorce ever since then. (It would have been the third divorce.) Then, my other wife wanted to make sure that I divorced her so on several occasions, she ask me to say, "I divorced her". I said it with the intention of informing a matter of the past; that is, "I divorced her that time", for example. Did the divorce take place?
Answer
All perfect praise be to Allah, The Lord of the Worlds. I testify that there is none worthy of worship except Allah, and that Muhammad 
is His slave and Messenger.
If your wife asked you to divorce your other wife, then she is sinful as this is prohibited in the authentic Sunnah. Abu Hurayrah 
narrated that the Prophet said: "It is not lawful for a woman to ask for the divorce of her sister (i.e. the other wife of her husband) in order to have him for herself." [Al-Bukhari]
Also, she is not permitted to make a condition that your other wife renounces her rights so that she will stay with you in the marriage bond, nor is she permitted to ask for divorce except for a legitimate reason. For information on the sound reasons for asking for divorce, please refer to Fatwa 131953.
The wording which you mentioned is like a conditional divorce, and we clarified the rulings on that in Fatwa 83152.
If you really intended that you wanted to tell her that if she did not accept those conditions, she is divorced, and that you did not intend to put a condition when you uttered this, then the intention here is what matters, as oaths can be restricted and conditioned by intention as stated by the jurists. Hence, if you did not utter that condition to your wife, the divorce did not take place even if she did what you named as a condition for the divorce.
In any case, in principle the marriage is still valid and uncertainties are not given any weight in divorce. The marriage bond is confirmed with certainty so the situation remains as such unless there is certainty or predominant conjecture, as per the Fiqh maxim: 'Certainty is not removed by doubt'.
On the other hand, if you told your wife that you divorced your other wife, intending to speak about the divorce that took place in the past, then this does not result in divorce if you did not intend to initiate a new divorce, in which case it is an unadulterated lie.
For more benefit, please refer to Fataawa 164315 and 187245.
Allaah knows best.
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