Concerning menstruation:

While enumerating the colors of menstrual blood he said: “d) al-kudrah (muddy, brownish discharge): it lies midway between white and black, resembling dirty water. The evidence is the report of ʿAlqamah … from his mother Marjānah, the freedwoman of ʿĀʾishah, who said: ‘Women used to send to ʿĀʾishah a small container with cotton on which there was a yellowish stain, and she would say, “Do not be hasty until you see the clear white discharge.”’ It was transmitted by Mālik and Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan, and al-Bukhārī cited it in suspended form.”

I say: No one besides Ibn Ḥibbān declared this Marjānah reliable, yet she is corroborated by ʿAmrah, who related the same meaning from ʿĀʾishah; al-Bayhaqī recorded it (1/336) with a ḥasan isnād.1

Although the report is formally mawqūf, it carries the force of being marfūʿ for several reasons, the strongest of which is that it is supported by the implied meaning of the ḥadith of Umm ʿAṭiyyah cited later in this book: “We would not regard yellowish or muddy discharge, after purification, as anything.” Implicitly, then, such discharge was considered menstruation before purification, and that is the view of the majority, as al-Shawkānī noted.

I formerly thought that menstruation was limited to black blood, basing myself on the outward sense of the ḥadith of Fāṭimah bint Abī Ḥubaysh mentioned in this work. While composing these notes, however, it has become clear to me—just as Sayyid Sābiq affirmed—that redness, yellowness, and muddy discharge are also deemed menstrual before purification, in light of this ḥadith and its corroboration. Moreover, the ḥadith of Fāṭimah does not conflict with them, for it concerns a woman experiencing istiḥāḍah whose menstrual blood had become mixed with her non-menstrual bleeding; she distinguished the latter from the former by its blackness—when she saw the black blood she refrained from prayer, and when she saw something else she prayed. The ḥadith admits no other interpretation. Allah knows best.