The Clans
IN THE NAME OF GOD, THE MOST GRACIOUS, THE DISPENSER OF GRACE[33:49]
O YOU who have attained to faith! If you marry believing women and then divorce them ere you have touched them, you have no reason to expect, and to calculate, any waiting-period on their part: hence, make [at once] provision for them, and release them in a becoming manner.

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* v.49 : Lit., “you have no waiting-period whatever upon them which you should count” – i.e., “which either of you should take into account as an obligation”: cf. the first part of 2:228, and the corresponding note 215. Since the question of pregnancy does not arise if the marriage has not been consummated, a waiting-period on the part of the divorced wife would be meaningless and of no benefit either to her or to her former husband.
* This injunction, relating to certain marital problems which affect the believers in general, forms an introduction, as it were, to a resumption, in the next verse, of the discourse on the marital laws applying exclusively to the Prophet: thus, it connects with the passage beginning with the words, “O wives of the Prophet! You are not like any of the [other] women” (verse 32), as well as with the subsequent reference to his marriage with Zaynab (verses 37 f.).