Sūrah 65 · Āyāt 1–5

Divorce for the waiting-period, its bounds, and the promise to the God-wary (65:1-5)

The sura opens by addressing the Prophet as head of the community while legislating for all Muslims: divorce is to be pronounced li-ʿiddatihinna — at the onset of a clean waiting-period — the ʿidda counted, the woman kept in her marital home and not turned out (nor herself leaving) unless she commits a manifest indecency. These are 'God's bounds'; transgressing them wrongs oneself. The section then legislates the choices at the end of the term (honourable retention or parting, with two just witnesses), the ʿidda-variants for the non-menstruating and the pregnant, and crowns the rulings with a promise: whoever fears God, He will make for him a way out and provide him whence he does not reckon.

al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) reads the opening address as a rhetorical convention — the leader is named, the ruling embraces him and his community — and stresses that 'divorcing for the ʿidda' means divorce in a non-intercourse purity so the term runs cleanly. His signature contribution is the twofold reading of 65:3: in context it guarantees the God-wary relief and sustenance; taken absolutely it becomes a doctrine of tawakkul and divine walāya — the servant whose will dissolves into God's will is taken into God's guardianship and provided materially and spiritually 'whence he does not reckon', a station he explicitly grades from the righteous awliyāʾ down to middling believers still tainted by 'hidden shirk'. He also notes that opposing the divorce-rulings ranks among the greater sins that 65:5's remission does not automatically cover.

al-Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān) and al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) supply the legal-philological spine. Both record the variant fī qubuli ʿiddatihinna (attributed to Ibn ʿAbbās, Ubayy, ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥusayn, al-Ṣādiq and others) and lay out the Imāmī position against the Sunnī schools: divorce during menstruation, or thrice at once, is void or reduces to a single pronouncement (Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyab and the Imāmiyya) — against Abū Ḥanīfa and al-Shāfiʿī, who count it effective though an innovation. They anchor this in the Ibn ʿUmar incident (al-Bukhārī, Muslim) where the Prophet made him take his menstruating wife back, and in prophetic warnings against frivolous divorce ('divorce shakes the Throne'; the 'fragrance of the Garden' forbidden to the woman who seeks divorce without cause; 'God does not love the tasters'). On the 'indecency' both weigh fornication (so she is brought out for the ḥadd) against foulness toward the husband's household — the latter reported from al-Bāqir, al-Ṣādiq and al-Riḍā. They catalogue the ʿidda-types (cycles, months, delivery) and both cite ʿAlī that 'those with child, their term is to deliver' concerns divorcées specifically, the pregnant widow observing the further of the two terms.

al-Baḥrānī (al-Burhān) fills the passage with the Imāmī narrative corpus: Zurāra's long ḥadīth from al-Bāqir distinguishing ṭalāq al-sunna from ṭalāq al-ʿidda; al-Ṣādiq's 'thrice in one sitting is nothing'; al-Riḍā and al-Kāẓim defining the 'indecency' as harming the husband's household; a striking report ascribed to al-Qāʾim (via Saʿd al-Qummī) that the indecency is siḥāq (rather than zinā); and traditions that the waiting woman may adorn herself 'that God may bring about a new thing' — i.e. reconciliation. al-Qummī compresses the same material into a continuous gloss (procedure, the fāḥisha, the pregnant's term, the revocable divorcée's right to lodging and maintenance), closing with al-Ṣādiq's terse reading of 65:3 — the 'way out' is in his worldly life.

The Enlightening Commentary frames the whole as Islam's humane discipline of divorce: the ʿidda protects lineage and leaves the door open to settlement, revocable divorce (ṭalāq rijʿī) being the norm, with the wife kept honourably in the home precisely so that cooled tempers may reconcile.