Menstruation serves as a critical site for feminist pedagogy, offering students a lens to interrogate gender, authority, and embodied religious experience. In my undergraduate course, I assign Yasmin Nurgat’s article, "Menstruation and the Ṭawāf al-Ifāḍa: A Study of Ibn Taymiyya’s Landmark Ruling of Permissibility" (Hawwa, 2020), as a case study in Islamic legal reasoning and gendered religious agency. This reading allows students to examine how juristic discourse navigates questions of purity, ritual access, and interpretive authority. To deepen engagement, I assign a scaffolded reflection in which students analyze how Ibn Taymiyya’s ruling departs from dominant legal norms, consider its implications for Muslim women’s ritual participation, and reflect on the broader stakes of legal plurality. By positioning menstruation as a site of inquiry, we illuminate hidden gendered dynamics and systemic inequities, making it relevant to disciplines such as Public Health, Anthropology, Economics, Public Policy, and Environmental Studies.
Menstruation serves as a critical site for feminist pedagogy, offering students a lens to interrogate gender, authority, and embodied religious experience. In my undergraduate course, I assign Yasmin Nurgat’s article, "Menstruation and the Ṭawāf al-Ifāḍa: A Study of Ibn Taymiyya’s Landmark Ruling of Permissibility" (Hawwa, 2020), as a case study in Islamic legal reasoning and gendered religious agency. This reading allows students to examine how juristic discourse navigates questions of purity, ritual access, and interpretive authority. To deepen engagement, I assign a scaffolded reflection in which students analyze how Ibn Taymiyya’s ruling departs from dominant legal norms, consider its implications for Muslim women’s ritual participation, and reflect on the broader stakes of legal plurality. By positioning menstruation as a site of inquiry, we illuminate hidden gendered dynamics and systemic inequities, making it relevant to disciplines such as Public Health, Anthropology, Economics, Public Policy, and Environmental Studies.