Menstruation and Making Up Fasts: The View of the Human Being Among Muslim Legal Scholars

Menstruation, Fasting, and the Question of Foundations

The starting point is a concrete question I was asked on Instagram: “I’m not coping well with making up missed fasts. I haven’t made up the days in one stretch. What are the different positions on this? And may I fast during Ramadan while on my period, so that I can avoid making them up later?” In this seemingly practical question there is much more than a single rule about a detail. It is about the relationship between body and ritual, and the way Muslim legal scholars have been thinking about these topics for centuries.

You can already see in the question how closely bodily experience is tied to feelings of guilt and a sense of obligation. Menstruation is not just experienced as a bodily state, but also as a disturbance in a system of rituals that is strongly thought of in legal terms. Many of those affected carry the feeling of failing in front of God, of the rules, or of “the community”.

If you ask for the legal positions here, there is almost no room to move. According to all major traditional legal schools, a menstruating person may not fast during Ramadan. They are considered exempt from fasting in Ramadan, but they have to make those days up later. Anyone who fasts anyway in order to avoid making the days up is acting wrongly within these positions, and the fast doesn’t count. The rule is so clearly formulated that individual experience, exhaustion, or mental strain barely come into view.

There are also today’s Quranist currents. By that I mean people who only accept the Quran as a source of norms and reject other sources in principle. They allow prayer and fasting during the period, because they don’t find any explicit prohibition for it in the Quran. I personally am not particularly convinced by their methodological approaches.

What I’m interested in is not simply to replace a traditional position with a Quranist perspective. It would be short sighted to just look for the “right” position and then settle down again. Things get interesting when we make visible the deeper questions standing behind these positions: how do obligations actually arise, how are they justified, and why are certain rules later treated as “foundational”, although they have grown historically.

This is where one sore spot of Muslim theology lies. There is a fundamental question that is hardly ever asked, because many people are afraid of putting supposed “foundations” into question. When you look more closely at the historical record, however, you see that these foundations were themselves constructed. They didn’t take shape in one clear step, but gradually. Some of them are much younger than the pious self image would suggest.

How Practices Were Turned Into Foundations

Many bases that are seen today as untouchable only really settled into place between the 3rd and 4th century after the hijra,¹ that is, around 300 years after the Prophet. Before that they were the subject of heated disputes. Some ideas took hold early, shortly after his death, while others took a long time before they felt “self evident”.

Today they seem as if they had been there from the very beginning. In many sermons and textbooks the impression is created that there was a clear, unified teaching from which some later deviated. Historically that’s not how it was. From the start there was a variety of positions, and only in retrospect were certain interpretations sold as “the” authentic line. When we talk about menstruation, fasting, and making up fasts, we are touching exactly this long history of disputes and questions of power.

Among the supposed “foundations” are the acts of worship. By that I mean things like prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, or ritual purity, which are understood as direct forms of worshipping God. In the course of systematising the norms, Muslim scholars from the 3rd century after the hijra onwards formulated a dogma. A dogma is a fixed article of faith that may no longer be put into question.

The dogma roughly says: acts of worship must be set and defined directly by God or by the Prophet. Anything that can’t be clearly traced back to divine revelation or to prophetic practice counts as problematic or suspicious. Every statement about ritual acts is therefore supposed to rest on a textual hint or on a practice of the early community. The claim is: here we have a clear trace back to God or to the Prophet, and so this is the right way.

In this way, locally grown practice and the selection of certain transmissions get turned into a “foundation”. What is easily forgotten is that this selection itself was a human decision, made in specific historical situations. With this move, the field of rituals was largely pulled out of critical reflection. They “may not” be historically researched, developed further, or adapted to people’s needs and contexts.

Anyone who tries anyway is quickly seen as misled, or as someone dissolving or even destroying “religion”. The result is highly ritualised, strongly formalised actions. The relationship between the human being and God moves into the background. The main thing becomes the formally “correct” performance of the rite, even when people are reaching their physical and mental limits in the process.

If you read the sources carefully, you also notice a difference between the faith practice in Mecca and the one in Medina. The Medinan material is far more normative, that is, much more often it deals with concrete rules and prohibitions. Looking more closely shows: many norms about menstrual blood, about the status of the menstruating person, about exceptions to rituals, and about exclusions from certain acts find an almost word for word counterpart in Jewish traditions of the region.

You can’t seriously brush this aside. It shows how strongly the early Muslim community was in conversation with its religious surroundings, how it took up, adapted, and recombined material. If we take this seriously, the question arises how “foundational” these rules actually are. Are they pure revelation without a history, or are they also the result of exchange, reception, and adaptation to religious and social patterns of the time? This does not automatically make the rules wrong, but it does speak against treating them too quickly as timeless forms that may never be changed.

Rituals, History, Power, and the Example of Fasting

This brings us to a question that is rarely asked openly in Muslim theology. Is the early Muslim practice really universal? Do people have to worship God for all times the way a certain community in 7th century Medina lived? Or was this form one possible form among others, plausible back then, but that could look different today? The question is uncomfortable, because it touches the self image of many religious circles.

The universalisation of the prophetic experience and of the practice of the first community is something that happened after the Prophet, not during his lifetime. Only afterwards did a concrete community in Medina get turned into the model for all times. Right after his death there were voices with different views, some of which radically diverged. Many of these voices were silenced very early in the 1st century, in part by direct violence. They are only remembered today through the distorted writing of history, which calls them “apostates”.

The first Muslim century was extremely brutal, with civil wars and power struggles in which religious arguments were used politically. Today this is rarely brought up, at least in Sunni circles. Instead, an ahistorical, romanticising, and also dangerous image of the “perfect first generation” dominates many minds. This image covers up how strongly questions of power were involved in which practice ended up being established as the “normal” practice.

If we look at the Quran, a different picture of rituals appears. First, very little is said in total about ritual details. Second, precise descriptions of movements, sequences, or exact times are almost entirely missing. There are general formulations that speak of prayer and fasting, but the concrete forms are left open. These details only appear later in transmissions which grew more numerous over time, and which in places even contradict each other.

Already in the first century after the hijra there are differences in practice and in the stories about it. Almost all rituals, both their forms and their meanings, were the subject of discussions. There wasn’t a fixed, correct teaching “at the beginning” from which some later deviated. Historically there was no unified teaching at first. It was in the process of forming, several positions stood side by side, and which perspective became dominant was often decided only later.

The forms and meanings of the rituals as we know them today were strongly shaped by the Umayyad empire.² The Umayyads were the first major dynasty after the “four” caliphs. In their time, rituals and certain interpretations of rituals were stabilised and set as norms. This also had to do with securing power. Whoever defines what “correct” prayer or “proper” fasting is also defines who counts as devout and who is an outsider. This link between ritual and power still has effects today.

Fasting is a good example of this development. At the beginning, the Quran offers a position that, according to later transmissions, is said to have been abrogated, that is, lifted.³ Nevertheless, the older verse still stands in the text. In substance, it says that people have a choice between fasting or feeding those in need. Fasting and giving appear as two possible ways of fulfilling the duty.

Later, the great majority of scholars declared this rule lifted, and said that now only fasting applied. Giving was no longer an equivalent substitute, at most an additional good deed. At the same time there were other voices, for instance Ibn ʿAbbās and his student ʿAṭāʾ. They said: this Quranic passage is not abrogated, it remains valid, but only for people who cannot fast, such as the elderly or chronically ill. A compromise emerged: the verse did not disappear, but was reduced to a narrow special case.

What is interesting is this. The Quranic text actually says the opposite of what was later made of it. It speaks of people who are able to fast and who may still choose to give instead. Later Quran commentaries turned this into: what is meant are only “those who cannot fast”. The word “not” doesn’t even appear in the text. It is read in, so that the passage fits later consensus and dogma.

What’s exciting here is not the detailed legal discussion, but the fact that this discussion existed at all, and that it remained open across generations. It shows how flexible the interpretations were in the first centuries. Only much later did they look as if they had been clear from the very beginning.

For our question today this is important. If there were openings and open discussions back then, why should we act today as though every opening had vanished? If the Quran itself hints at a choice, and this choice was later narrowed by interpretation or by a specific historical practice, then we have to ask how much of what we know today as a “duty” is the result of such narrowings. And we have to think anew about how we deal with people for whom certain forms of ritual are hardly bearable anymore, even though they take their faith seriously.

”Not Being Able To” Today: Body, Mind, and Modern Lives

From here, a seemingly simple but fundamental question opens up. What does “not being able to” mean in the context of fasting and other rituals? Is “not being able” only a physiological question, that is, a question of the body? Or does the psychological dimension belong to it just as much? Traditional legal teaching barely knows psychological factors, because psychology and the neurosciences have only been systematically developed since the 20th century.

The scholars of the early period had no specialised knowledge of depression, anxiety disorders, burn out, hormonal imbalances, or other mental strains that shape life today. They saw suffering, grief, and overload, but they made sense of all of that in different ways. Right here lies a problem. The old systems of norms don’t reflect these realities. If we apply them one to one to today’s lives, we leave many people alone with their experiences.

Rituals have, over the course of history, often become an end in themselves. They were declared the core of faith. Anyone who prays “correctly” and fasts “properly” counts as a good Muslim. Anyone who can’t manage this is quickly seen as deficient. In the main scripture of the Muslim world, that is, the Quran,⁴ however, something else dominates. In a large portion of the suras, the focus is on justice, mercy, responsibility, protection of the weak, and moral integrity.

These elements were pushed aside in many discussions, while positions emerged like: “Anyone who doesn’t pray is not a Muslim.” No one formulated with the same sharpness: “Anyone who is not merciful is not a Muslim.” This shift can be traced particularly clearly in the Umayyad period. Certain rituals and ritual debates were inflated, as if they were the centre of the prophetic message. In this way, questions of justice, power, and responsibility could be deflected from.

When believers are reduced to their prayers and fast days, fewer questions are asked about exploitation, violence, and structural injustice. In this light, the classical answer to the menstruation question looks different again. The question “May I fast during Ramadan while on my period in order to avoid making it up later?” doesn’t only touch a technical rule. It touches the question of whether we even see the burdens, feelings of shame, and life situations of those affected.

Or do we make rituals so absolute that people have to fit themselves to them, no matter how they feel physically and mentally? The decisive question then becomes: what about those who can’t? What about people for whom these forms no longer nourish spiritual life, or even burden it? Or people whose physical and mental situation is so fragile that strictly clinging to old rule books would do more harm than good?

The usual reaction of many scholars and neotraditionalist circles is: the people are the problem, they are lazy, weak in faith, and have too little fear of God. That is too short. People are different. They carry different worries and traumas, live in very different contexts, and stand under very different pressures. The Muslim world of the early period did not know a globalised world, did not know constant reachability, and did not know precarity in today’s form.

Modernity has changed life radically. Just the way we sleep today, since artificial light, can hardly be compared with the 7th century. Working hours, shift work, dealing with screens, the speed of everyday life, all of this changes the body and the mind. If we act as though we could simply take over norms from a completely different time without thinking these changes through, we are being negligent. Faith practice can then easily turn into an additional burden, rather than a resource.

So a different leading question emerges: what do we pass on to people? Are the ideas about ritual and obligation still responsible toward real lives? Or is a system being defended mainly for its own sake? The Instagram question about menstruation and making up fasts is a concrete occasion to think about this bigger question. It invites us to reorder the relationship between text, history, body, and power, and to ask what a theology might look like that takes the vulnerability of people seriously, without losing the spiritual depth of being Muslim.

Who Is Your God, and What Does That Mean for You?

Instead of finished answers, in my view, what we need are other questions. Each of us should honestly ask: who is my God? Whom do I worship? Whom do I really “serve”? These questions may sound abstract, but they decide how you make sense of your fear, your guilt, and your longing.

When you imagine who meets you in the end, when everything is over, what does this God look like? How does this God speak with you, how does this God look at you? Is this God someone who will punish you because you didn’t manage to practise certain rituals, rituals that in other times were physically and socially much easier to carry out than they are today? Or is “your” God different? Can you picture a God who knows your limits, your tiredness, your mental state, your life situation, and who knows how hard you are trying, even when the result, on the outside, doesn’t look “perfect”?

For me, part of this is the reminder that turning acts of worship into legal duties, for the omission of which one is punished, is not how the Quran presents them. The Quran speaks of responsibility, of paths, of an invitation, and of consequences, but it doesn’t present rituals as a rigid criminal code. What matters to me is an authentic relationship with your God, a healthy relationship with your God. It is not about a simple either or, of the kind that says: either you fulfil every form exactly, or you are lost.

The unspoken assumption is often this. If I don’t practise the way people in the 7th and 8th centuries set up and constructed, then God is angry with me. Those people were later idealised, as if they were flawless role models. Historically they were just as ambivalent as we are, with their own interests, blind spots, and limits. If I don’t “serve” God the way they prescribed, the “loving God” will reject me. Exactly this assumption is, in my view, the point that needs to be taken apart.

Look deep into yourself, and look into the vastness of the world. Then honestly ask: who really is my God? If you truly believe that God might keep you in hell in a “grilling state” forever for such things, then it is consistent to listen strictly to what old legal scholars said and to carry it out as exactly as possible. You are then following an image of God shaped mainly by fear and punishment.

But if you don’t believe that your God is like that, if you believe that rituals are possibilities to come closer to God and can be a positive part of your everyday life and your spirituality, then your actions change. Then you will act in a way that is honest and right for you, not just in the way others find “right” for you. You will care about being honest before God, acknowledging your limits, and taking your longing seriously.

In this stance, your practice is not an escape from tradition, but a mature way of being in relationship with it. Your answer to the question “who is my God?” co decides how you deal with fasting, prayer, menstruation, making up fasts, and many other topics, and whether your religiosity makes you small and anxious, or whether it strengthens you and helps you to stand upright and honest before God and before yourself.

Footnotes

1. By hijra is meant the Prophet’s emigration from Mecca to Medina in the year 622, which marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar. ↩

2. The Umayyad empire was the first major Muslim dynasty (661 to 750), centred in Damascus, which strongly shaped the early practice of law and ritual. ↩

3. By abrogation, in Arabic naskh, is meant the idea that a later verse of revelation lifts an earlier rule, fully or in part. ↩

4. The Quran is regarded in many traditions as the most important written source of the Muslim world, alongside further bodies of text such as the Hadith collections. ↩