I am in a desperate situation, and I hope you can help me. During my marriage, due to some bad behaviour on the part of my wife we argued and due to intense anger I used to threaten her with divorce. My intention was only ever to shock her and make her understand the seriousness of the situation, but I never intended divorce in a true sense. In some of our arguments, I used to threaten her with divorce and say to her, You are divorced. I also wrote to her, when she was in India, saying: If you do not listen to me, I shall divorce you. After that, I wrote to her saying: You are divorced. I swear by Allah that in all of these arguments (verbal or written), I never intended to divorce her at all; I only wanted to scare her. Do these threats or my saying, You are divorced, in anger, without intending divorce, count as divorce?

Praise
be to Allah

Firstly:

If a husband
says to his wife: “Anti taaliq (you are divorced),” then this clearly counts
as divorce and does not depend on what your intention was; your saying that
you only wanted to scare her or threaten her is not acceptable. So divorce
occurs when you say “You are divorced”, regardless of your intention, so
long as you meant to say that and understood the meaning of the word.

If one who is
asleep or is not aware of what he is saying (for any reason) utters the word
of divorce without meaning to utter it, then his divorce does not count as
such. The same applies if one who does not know Arabic utters the word
talaaq (divorce) without knowing what it means; his divorce does not count
as such.

But if a person
says it deliberately and knows what it means, then divorce counts as such,
even if he did not intend it to happen.

Al-Qarraafi said
in al-Furooq (3/163):

When the fuqaha’
said that the intention (niyyah) is a condition in the case of uttering a
clear or explicit word of divorce, what they meant was that the person
uttered that phrase deliberately, which excludes slips of the tongue when
the person had no intention of uttering the word of divorce, such as if his
wife’s name is Taariq and he is calling her but by mistake he calls her
Taaliq (meaning divorced). In that case, nothing results from his saying
that, because he did not intend to utter the word of divorce.

And when the
fuqaha’ said that the intention (niyyah) is not a condition in the case of
uttering a clear or explicit word of divorce, what they meant was that the
person intended divorce by using a certain phrase (in other words, he used
it with the intention of divorce). In that case the intention is not a
condition when using an explicit word of divorce, according to scholarly
consensus; rather the intention of divorce is a condition only when he uses
words that are not explicit.

If you took your
wife back after having divorced her, then you divorced her a second time by
saying, You are divorced, then this counts as two divorces on your part.

This applies if
you uttered the word of divorce. But if you wrote it, then the divorce does
not count as such unless you had the intention of divorcing her, because
what is written is not regarded as being an explicit form of divorce; rather
it is implicit. Please see question no. 72291.

With regard to
your saying: If you do not listen to me I am going to divorce you, this is
the threat of divorce in the future. If you carry out your threat and
divorce her, then it counts as such, but if you do not carry out your threat
and do not actually divorce her, nothing results from a mere threat.

Secondly:

With regard to
divorce issued at a time of anger, some cases do not count as such,
according to scholarly consensus; some do count as such, according to
scholarly consensus; and in some cases there is a difference of scholarly
opinion, according to the type and level of anger involved. We have
discussed this previously in the answers to questions no.
22034 and 45174.

The conclusion
reached there is that in cases of anger that makes a person no longer aware
of what he is saying, divorce does not count as such. The same applies to
extreme anger that compels a person to utter the word of divorce, when in a
normal situation of calmness he would not issue a divorce.

This is the view
favoured by a number of scholars.

Based on that,
if you uttered the word of divorce in a state of extreme anger, and were it
not for that anger you would not have issued a divorce, then the divorce
does not count as such.

But if it was an
instance of ordinary anger that did not lead to you not knowing what you
were saying, then the divorce does count as such.

Our advice to
you is to go yourself to the shar‘i court in the place where you live.

If there is no
such court, then go to the mufti among the scholars of the country where you
live, and explain to him what happened and what you said about divorce, so
that he can give you a fatwa and advise you on the basis of clear
understanding, after you have explained the situation in detail.

If you can take
your wife with you, that will be better.

And Allah knows
best.