Assalam Alaikum Yet again another question from a Islamic yahoo group. salaam alaikum to those who may not know me my name is “so and so “and I am a convert for 1½ years now alhamdulillah. I got married approx. 11 months ago to a man in Jordan. My husband is still in Jordan where as I came back to America a month or so after our marriage. We have been apart for roughly 10 months. Recently we was talking on the phone when I made a comment about putting on a few extra pounds since he last saw me because I am suppose to go to Jordan in 3 weeks to stay with him until he is able to come to America after Ramadan insha Allah. I then proceeded to joke and say maybe he will give me talaq and find a skinny woman. Then suddenly he did just that “talaq talaq talaq” I was devistated and I said I can’t believe you just divorced me. He said he didn’t that he just said it and in his heart he has no intentions and that I am misunderstanding. I said no I think even if you joke it is still talaq. So I looked up fatwas from sunnipath and other sources, called my local imam, and consulted another scholar they all said that this is talaq and pointed me into the direction of Quran and hadiths. My husband and his family are saying this is not true that the same thing happened to his sister 1 month ago and they went to the shaihk in Jordan and he made her husband pay some money and everything was fine, I asked where in the hadiths is this. because everything I am reading is saying we are really divorced and I have to remarry someone else consummate and get talaq in order to be able to be with my husband again one source said that, and another source said that this only counts as 1 talaq and right now I am in Iddah and he has to accept me back within my iddah and all will be fine. then if he does it again 2 more separate incidents then its 3 talaqs. Please help me because I need to do what Allah wants not what some people say is their version of what’s right. If I am right in my thinking and I have to have another husband could I marry consummate and ask him to divorce me or do I have to start a real marriage all over again. I really don’t want to I just want to be with my husband but I have to set aside what I want and do what Allah decrees. Also no one in his family is accepting what I am suspecting they are disputing me without any quran or sunnah references and I fear if I am right that how can I break this to them? I really don’t know what to do and I just need some competent guidance.

All praise be to Allah, and may his peace and blessings be on the last and best prophet and messenger, Muhammad.

This matter is controversial. While some consider this as three divorces, others consider those three divorces pronounced in the same session to count as one.
I believe they count as one, since this used to be the case during the time of the Prophet, Abu Bakr and the beginning of the rulership of Omar as reported by Muslim from Ibn Abbas. Then, Omar punished those who committed the sin of repeating the talaq trice by counting them as three. This doesn’t change the initial rule, and it seems that those three divorces count as one.
You may go back to your husband, and warn him that what he did was utterly wrong, and one divorce was counted against him and if he divorced you two more times, you can’t go back to him until you have married – for real – another man, and got divorced from him. You can’t get married just to go back to the first one.

Allah knows best.