Today’s inquiry into the nature of legal fictions takes us to Jordan’s government-run Sharia courts, where the concept of “divorce before consummation” (ṭalāq qabl al-dakhūl) has become something of a “living fiction.” Nowadays, “divorce before consummation” is dutifully tracked through the Sharia Courts’ Annual Statistical Report in its section on divorces. Those figures are (somewhat ironically) further disseminated by dissident Islamic intellectuals in their critiques of the state, its courts, and the broader society. A representative sample of over 800 marriage contracts dating from 1926 to 2011 that I constructed shows that the category of “divorce before consummation” appeared relatively suddenly in marriage contracts in the late nineties, after which point a small but consistent number of contracts in the sample invoked the category. Interviews with Court officials and experts in customary law reveal that secular officials in governors’ offices have been obviating Sharia Court authority for decades in extreme cases of “divorce before consummation” in the name of public order. Yet despite solving an immediate problem by filling a gap in the courts’ system of terminology for personal [marital] status, the concept has simultaneously become a sort of platform from which people can voice critiques of not only the broader society but also the state and the courts themselves.