There is no authentic hadith disparaging Khulʿ or Divorce.
There is a famous hadith that says that ‘Divorce (talaq) is the most loathed by God of permissible things.’ Imam Abu Dawud narrated it in his Sunan in two ways, starting with the disconnected version, to point out that it is the more correct version, followed by the connected version. In other words, he wants to show that the disconnected version is more correct and the connected version is a mistake. This was pointed out by Imam Sakhawi in al-Maqasid al-Hasana (p. 11).
And yet preachers keep quoting it and saying it is in Abu Dawud!
This hadith is not considered authentic according to all the hadith experts, including:
- Abu Dawud (as seen above)
- Abu Hatim al-Razi (see Ibn Abi Hatim, al-Ilal, 1:431).
- Al-Daraqutni (al-Ilal, 13:225)
- Al-Bayhaqi (al-Sunan al-Kubra, 7:322)
- Ibn Abd al-Hadi (al-Muharrar, 1:567)
- Al-Sakhawi (al-Maqasid al-Hasana, 11).
Similarly, there is no authentic hadith disparaging Khulʿ.
Imam Tirmidhi has a section on ‘Women who Seek Khulʿ’.
He starts with the hadith that says ‘Women who seek khulʿ are the hypocritical ones!’, but he immediately points out that it is not authentic. In his work al-Ilal al-Kabir he also mentions asking his teacher Imam Bukhari about it, who also rejected it (see Tartib Ilal al-Tirmidhi, no. 304). Imam Abu Zur’a al-Razi also pointed out that it was disconnected and that weak narrators attempted to ‘fix the chain’ by inserting a name in the place where it is disconnected (see Ibn Abi Hatim, al-Ilal, no. 913 and 1395).
After this, Imam Tirmidhi follows it with another hadith, starting with ‘It has also been narrated that…’ to indicate that it is also not strong. This hadith states that ‘Any woman who leaves her husband by way of khulʿ despite not going through great difficulty, will not even smell the scent of Jannah.’
Imam Tirmidhi grades it as hasan, which in his classification means that it does not have any liars or fabricators in the chain, nor is it a well-known mistaken hadith, but he does not authenticate it because of the uncertainty regarding its chain and the likelihood of it being a mistake. He then immediately tells us what the problem is: that it has been narrated in three conflicting versions, one of which is disconnected, and one with an unknown narrator. In fact in the earlier collections of Abd al-Razzaq and Ibn Abi Shayba (the teachers of his teachers) the hadith is narrated as disconnected (see al-Musnad al-Musannaf al-Mu’allal).
That is why al-Qadi Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi al-Maliki commented on this hadith in his commentary on Tirmidhi,
The Prophet ﷺ (supposedly) saying ‘she will not even smell the scent of Jannah’ is such an enormous threat of punishment that does not match her request to exit a marriage, and it is not authentic.
– Qadi Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi, Tuhfat al-Ahwadhi, 5:160.
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