The Egyptian President, ʿAbd al-Fattaḥ al-Sīsī, has revealed that work is underway to draft a law stipulating that any verbal divorce lacking official documentation will not be accepted. The President cited statistics from the Dār al-Iftāʾ stating that it deals with hundreds of thousands of divorce cases, the vast majority of which have no official documentation, to demonstrate the need for the new law. This development has caused conflict with al-Azhar, which has expressed its opinion that verbal divorce is legitimate, as it had been used since the time of the Prophet Muḥammad.