Islamic Embodiments of Menstruation

This paper is a study of the embodied phenomenology of menstruation in Islam, a corporeal experience tied to the womb, and exposed to dense religious intentions across Muslim societies. Within the Islamic scriptural, legal, and ethical tradition, the menstrual cycle (hayd) has been addressed as a monumental topic of piety, with tenets of prayer, fasting, marriage, and pilgrimage being intimately governed by the timing, volume, and color of menstrual flow. During the classical-era of formative Islamic thought and beyond, the ‘ulama have distinguished between of various types of vaginal blood and regarded this to be a crucial subject of Islamic legal discourse, tying it to various legal processes, such as when a marriage is fully dissolved (‘iddah ends), when one should begin or stop prayers, or when one should miss the compulsory fasts.[1] Scholars such as Marion Katz and Celene Ibrahim have documented these exegetical and scriptural contours of menstruation within ‘ulama discourse, underscoring the centrality of the menstruation within the Islamic tradition.[2] While the discursive weight of the Islamic textual tradition shadows the experience of menstruation for Muslim women, the sensory and visceral knowledge possessed by Muslim women by way of their menstrual physiology, has received little attention within Islamic Studies.    

Drawing on the emphasis on menstruation in Islam, and basing analysis on ethnographic accounts from contemporary Pakistan, this paper inverts the doctrine-making direction of menstrual edicts in Islam. It asks how the bodily interiority, segregation, and embodied nature of menstruation dictates the context of its Islamic interpretation. The ‘thinking’ and agential body, as a concept, lives in the phenomenological frameworks of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who shows that if one of conscious of the body “via the world”, then the body, too, is able to carve the world of its own meanings.[3] The discussion of menstruation within Islamic Studies has focused overwhelmingly on the former, with menstruation treated as a passive bodily phenomenon made conscionable in the Islamic world via external fiqh understandings of purity, piety, sexuality, and prayer. However, the role of menstrual physiology in furnishing its Islamic bodily meanings in the terrain of everyday Islamic life deserves attention. Developing on Elizabeth Grosz’s concepts of the uncontainment of the body, and on the cerebral and agential nature of body materialities, this paper argues that menstruation is not just imagined and regulated by Islamic law, but that the physiological experience of menstruation itself allows for the re-imagination of Islam in the bodily and domestic realm. Theoretically, while this paper focuses on the menstrual body as creator of Islamic meanings, it moves away from embodied concepts which espouse a social-less notion of the body. Developing on Marcel Mauss and Grosz’s framework which eschews both the absolute biology and the absolute social construction of bodily processes, my paper demonstrates a corporeality of menstruation amongst Muslim women in Pakistan whereby the experiential scope of menstruation provides the cultural meanings through which to understand it.[4]  

To demonstrate the above theoretical phenomenon, this paper utilizes the example of the contact of menstrual effluent with questions of waste disposal society: how do women in Pakistan manage menstrual waste, where to wash the menstrual cloth, where to dry it, where to store it? I include ethnographic accounts from three households in contemporary Karachi, Pakistan. The fate of menstrual blood ejected from the womb is a key question of Islamic purity that consume women, raised through novel situations in everyday life on which the Islamic legal texts are silent. Through ethnographic accounts written in Karachi, I demonstrate how the challenge of menstrual waste disposal, and consequent matters of observing Islamic purity (tahārah), illuminates lacunae in the institutional Islamic discourse of menstruation, enabling ordinary women to generate creative ways of navigating the question of Islamic menstrual purity. Through ethnographic accounts, I show that creative forms of Islamic knowledge-creation on menstruation in Pakistan include the parchhāva beliefs of menstruation, which are the result of bricolages between Islamic Sharīʿat rulings, vernacularized Perso-Indic beliefs, and Buddhist concepts of menstrual punishment that circulate as folk narratives of menstruation amongst women in Pakistani society, who are at a remove from the institutional discourse of the mosque and madrasas. Women tactically traffic these vernacularized Asian beliefs as ‘Islamic’ meanings of menstruation within the household, and across generations, to fill in lacunae of menstrual guidance in Islamic texts. In the context of Islamic menstrual pieties, menstrual corporeality enmeshes the biological with the religious, and presents a realm of knowledge outside the “juro-political accoutrements” of the public space where doctors and the ‘ulama are authorities of the menstrual experience.[5] The management of reproductive and menstrual aspects of the body are thus exclusively tied to the knowledge and practice of women in the domestic space, raising the matter of women’s embodied agency within the Islamic understanding of menstruation – and its attendant themes of hygiene and sexuality in Islam. 

In this sense, my paper explores the reproductive process of menstruation in Islam as a lived bodily experience which actively sets the scope of its own mediation, constraint, and regulation within the Islamic tradition. Drawing on phenomenology of menstruation in Islam, this paper shows through ethnographic accounts of Muslim women in Pakistan that menstrual flow is not inanimate material on which religious agency is practiced, but it is in fact an agential substance in itself, determining the contours of the religious possibilities of menstrual agency in Islam. 

[1] Marion H. Katz, “Scholarly Verses: Women’s Authority in the Islamic Law of Menstrual Purity,” Gender in Judaism and Islam, eds., Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet and Beth Wenger (NY: NYU Press, 2015), 73-100.

[2] Celene Ibrahim, “Menstruation,” Encyclopedia of Islam (Netherlands: Brill, 2014), 131-134; Marion H. Katz, Body of Text: The Emergence of the Sunni Law of Ritual Purity (NY: SUNY Press, 2002), 58.

[3] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of the Body, 82.

[4] Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 20-21; Marcel Mauss, "Techniques of the Body," Economy and Society 2, no. 1 (1973): 75-76.

[5] Carol S. McClain ed., Women as Healers: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 22.