Maryam Amir – Is menses a punishment Menses and Hajj

When I was about to be in hajj, an older woman came to me crying. She

said she had gotten her period, and she asked the woman around her

what to do, and they said it is a punishment from Allah. They asked

her what she did, what she did in hajj, to be so sinful that she got

her period. These are older women. Their entire lives, they've been

taught, and they've taught that your period, especially in a time

of heightened spiritual practice as a punishment from God. I get

messages like this from women who were told that they had done

something wrong. This idea that your natural, healthy, very

important, critical to humanity period as a punishment from God

does not come from Islam. In fact, a lot of the ways that we see

women's issues comes from colonialism and fortunately,

honestly, puritanical ideas of women in Christianity heavily

impacted Muslim culture, and that's not from our sources. When

Aisha radiAllahu anha went to hedge with the Prophet, peace be

upon you can imagine how excited she was after all these years of

being away from Mecca, being in Medina, and now she gets to make

hed, the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, and she gets her

period. She was devastated. She was crying. And the Prophet

sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, very gently, very kindly, asked her if

she got her period. And then the Prophet, peace be upon him. So

beautiful. This is something decreed for the daughters of Adam.

He connected her moment of pain and vulnerability with a prophet

of God, the shaming, the stigma, the blaming, the all of that

that's not from our sources. Rava Salaah. Salam taught her to do

everything that the Hajjaj do, except for make tawaf, obviously

we also don't make salah, but she would have known that Radi Allahu

anha and had you go to Mina, you go to Arafat, you go to Muslimah,

you go to the jamarat. These are all things you can do on your

period without needing wudu. But to complete the hedge, you need to

make a toe off, and that's the tricky part, because you can't

make tow off while you're on your period. So you can take

medication, but when you take medication, it's possible that you

might end up bleeding even more so than you might have without them.

And so what do you do? You have two options. One, you can wait

until your period is done, but that's simply not realistic for

the majority of us who don't live anywhere close to Mecca. Or two,

you can take Ibn Taymiyyah opinion. During the time of Ibn

Taymiyyah, Rahim Allah, the security that used to be a part of

the hajj process no longer existed. From the from the from

the khulafa, the leadership did not have the type of security it

used to in the time of the four the Imams of the form of that him.

And so he was faced with a question that none of them had

been faced with before. Bedouins were raiding caravans. Caravans

couldn't stay later and would leave immediately after the Hajj

was done for protection. So no caravan would wait for a woman to

finish her period anymore, when, in the past, they used to. So he

made a fatwa that a woman can make tawaf when she is bleeding on her

period. Some of the scholars say sacrifice should be given if she

does so, you can speak with your hedge group to figure out your

situation. Definitely take classes to understand your period. Here

are three I recommend. Have you done little? Claria, the woman

Quran, reciters, applause.