and the interval of purity that follows it is twenty-nine days.

If, however, she is a woman with an established habit—meaning that she has previously experienced both menstruation and the ensuing purity—she reverts to that habit in regard to both duration and timing, and one single occurrence is sufficient to fix the habit, according to the soundest opinion. When a habitual woman can also distinguish between strong and weak flows, the ruling is determined by that distinction rather than by her former habit, again on the sounder view.

A confused woman (muḥtārah) is one who has forgotten both the amount and the timing of her habit. According to one opinion she is treated like a complete beginner, but the well-known position is that she must adopt precaution: intercourse, touching the written Qur’an, and reciting it outside the prayer are forbidden; she must always perform the obligatory prayers—and, on the sounder view, the voluntary prayers as well—and she must perform a full ritual bath for every obligatory prayer. She fasts the month of Ramadan, then two complete months, thereby covering fourteen days from each month. After that, she fasts—out of a further eighteen days—three at the beginning and three at the end, which secures the remaining two days. One may also make up a single day by fasting one day, then the third and the seventeenth. If she can remember anything with certainty, that certainty prevails. On days that could be menstrual she is treated like a menstruant with respect to intercourse and like a pure woman with respect to worship; if a cessation of bleeding is possible, she must perform a ritual bath for every obligatory prayer.

The sounder opinion is that blood seen by a pregnant woman, as well as a dry interval that falls within the minimum span of a menstrual period, are both counted as menstruation. The minimum length of post-natal bleeding (nifās) is a single moment, its maximum is sixty days, and its common duration is forty. It renders unlawful all that menstruation renders unlawful, and any bleeding that extends beyond sixty days is treated just like bleeding that exceeds the menstrual maximum.