A Critique on the Concept of the Permissibility of Annulment of Marriage due to Adultery

Among the cases for which the wife may request the annulment of the marriage is the husband committing adultery. The current study was conducted with the purpose of examining the opinions of famous Imami jurists on this issue and criticizing the concept of the permissibility of annulment of marriage due to adultery. Therefore, written jurisprudential-legal works on this issue were studied and data were analyzed based on the analytical-documentary way. The results showed that the famous scholars, according to specific traditions, traditions that indicate the limitation of cucumbers and the principle of necessity, believe that adultery by a man does not lead to the emergence of the right of termination for a woman, while some jurists, citing special traditions, the rule of no harm and the violation of the attribute condition, this right is reserved for women. The analysis of the data showed that although the narrations cited in the second category do not have a document problem, due to the weakness of the intermediary, the symptoms of the jurists, and also the conflict with stronger evidence, it does not have sufficient strength. According to the available evidences, the hadiths on the necessity of separation should be carried over the necessity of divorce; otherwise, it is not possible to combine the conflicting hadiths, and one should consider them to be invalid and refer to the general arguments of the necessity of marriage. As a result, carrying the traditions of deduction on Taqiyyah and assuming the reputation of adultery, as well as invoking the rule of harm and violation of the attribute condition, faces many problems and cannot be used to prove the right of rescission.