Dr. Muḥammad al-Bār notes that, medically speaking, post-natal bleeding is the blood that exits the uterus after delivery. It normally lasts three to four weeks, though it can extend to forty days. During the first four days it is dark red, thick, and may contain clots; thereafter it gradually lightens, then turns brown and mixes with a mucous substance, until finally the “al-qaṣṣah al-bayḍāʾ” (clear white discharge) appears.

The bloody discharge may stop for a while and then reappear; this is usually due to small remnants of the placenta still lodged in the uterus.

– Naqʿud: one says qaʿada / yaqʿudu / quʿūd, meaning to desist and refrain from acts of worship that require ritual purity, such as prayer.

What is derived from the ḥadith:

1. Nifās is blood released by the uterus at the time of childbirth.
2. The legal rulings for a woman in nifās are the same as for a menstruating woman with respect to what is obligatory, forbidden, disliked, and permissible.
3. The woman experiencing nifās remains secluded for forty days, abstaining from what women in a state of purity perform; she leaves off the prayer and similar acts, starting from the moment she delivers anything in which the form of a human being is discernible.
   Al-Tirmidhī said: “The scholars unanimously agree that a woman in nifās abandons the prayer for forty days, unless she sees purification earlier; in that case she bathes and prays.”
   Ibn Rushd and others stated: “The onset of nifās is marked by the emergence of any part of the child.”
   Shaykh Taqī al-Dīn observed: “There is no minimum limit for nifās, nor a maximum— even if it exceeds seventy days and then ceases; forty days is merely the usual upper bound.”
4. Like the menstruating woman, the woman in nifās is not instructed to make up the prayers missed during her bleeding, but she must make up any obligatory fasts.

A brief medico-legal note on nifās:
Physicians define nifās as the period following childbirth that leads to the return