Iddah

The mandatory waiting period after divorce or the death of a husband, during which the wife cannot remarry. Iddah serves multiple purposes: confirming whether the wife is pregnant, providing time for reconciliation, and giving the wife a period of stability and financial maintenance. Quranic basis: 2:228, 2:234, 65:1.

Duration depends on circumstance - typically three menstrual cycles for divorce, four months and ten days for widowhood. In an Islamic prenup, iddah maintenance is preserved as a fixed financial obligation that a U.S. court can enforce alongside the prenup's other terms.

Iddah is the mandatory waiting period a woman observes after divorce or widowhood before remarrying - a rule with layered purposes: confirming she is not pregnant (establishing paternity), allowing reconciliation space in revocable divorce, and honoring the deceased in widowhood. The durations are Qur'anic: three menstrual cycles after divorce (2:228), delivery of the child if pregnant - however near or far that is (65:4) - four months and ten days for widows (2:234), and no iddah at all if the marriage was never consummated (33:49). The financial rules attached to iddah are what estate and family planners must know.

During a revocable divorce's iddah, the husband owes full maintenance and housing and cannot expel her from the home (65:1, 65:6); a widow's iddah carries residence rights in most schools. Inheritance hangs on it too: spouses divorced revocably still inherit from each other if one dies during the iddah - and classical law even penalizes deathbed divorce designed to disinherit a wife (the 'divorce of the fleeing man,' with many schools preserving her inheritance regardless). Deferred mahr falls due at the divorce that starts the iddah.

In U.S. practice, iddah is religiously binding but civilly invisible: state law imposes no waiting period beyond divorce-finalization timelines, so observance is a matter of personal compliance - and the support obligations iddah creates should be written into the civil settlement, since American courts will not infer them from fiqh.