At-Talaq ('The Divorce'), 12 Medinan verses, details the procedure of divorce, the waiting period (idda), the counting of its term, provision and lodging for the woman, and honest witnessing, framed by the promise that 'whoever fears God, He will make a way out for him' (65:2-3). At-Talaq's detailed procedural law, the waiting period, its calculation for women past or before menstruation and for the pregnant (65:4), maintenance during the waiting period, and honest witnessing at its conclusion, became, alongside the shorter treatment in Al-Baqara, one of the two main Quranic foundations later Islamic legal schools (madhahib) built their more elaborate divorce jurisprudence upon, with real differences among the schools on points the surah's own wording leaves open, such as the exact scope of maintenance owed to an irrevocably divorced woman.
The surah's repeated promise that God 'will make a way out' and 'provide from where one does not expect' for those who fear Him (65:2-3) became, independent of its original legal context of divorce procedure, one of the most widely quoted single verses of comfort in Islamic devotional literature, recited in circumstances having nothing to do with marital law. Classical jurists also drew on its instruction that divorced women be housed 'according to your means' (65:6) as a key text establishing that a husband's maintenance obligation during the waiting period scales with his actual financial capacity rather than a fixed universal sum.