Gendering Ritual: A Muslima’s Reading of the Laws of Purity and Ritual Preclusion

In their concern with sexual access, bodily purity, and pious compliance with juristic opinion, female reproductive-related rulings withinfiqhconstitute a key substratum for regulating female expression within devotional life and beyond.¹ In this essay I examine rules pertaining to the preclusion of menstruating females from select Muslim devotional rites. I rely primarily on Internetfatāwā²and contemporary pamphlets treating the subject of female im/purity by Sunni and Shi‘a legal specialists.³ The gendered aspects of purity regulations within Muslim legal discourse represent an underdeveloped area of analysis within critical Muslim feminist literatures.⁴ This is in contrast to a wealth of