Abū Ḥanīfah, Aḥmad, al-Thawrī, and others held that a pregnant woman does not menstruate; any blood she sees is considered corrupt blood arising from an ailment—unless the pangs of labor overtake her, for at that point they all agree that the blood is nifās and is governed by the same rulings as menstruation with respect to the prohibition of prayer and the other related injunctions.

Mālik and his companions, when trying to determine the point at which a pregnant woman who was formerly judged to be menstruating moves—on account of prolonged bleeding—from the rulings of menstruation to those of istiḥāḍah, put forward several divergent opinions:

1. She is treated exactly like a non-pregnant menstruant: either she refrains from worship for the maximum number of menstrual days, after which she is deemed mustaḥāḍah, or she adds three precautionary days to her customary period, provided that the total does not exceed fifteen days.
2. According to another view, she remains in the state of menstruation for twice the maximum length of a normal period.
3. A further opinion multiplies the maximum number of menstrual days by the number of months that have elapsed in the pregnancy: in the second month she doubles it, in the third she triples it, in the fourth she quadruples it, and so on for each additional month.

The reason for their disagreement is the difficulty of establishing the matter empirically and the fact that the two kinds of blood become confused. At times the blood a pregnant woman sees is genuine menstrual blood—this occurs when the woman is robust and the embryo still small, which, as Hippocrates, Galen, and the other physicians report, can even allow one pregnancy to be superimposed upon another. At other times the blood appears because the fetus is weak or ill, usually owing to the mother’s own weakness or illness; in such cases the blood is pathological, and in most instances it is indeed blood of illness.

Issue Five
The jurists also differed about yellowish or brownish discharge (ṣufrah and kudrah): is it menstruation or not? A number of scholars maintained that it is menstruation so long as it occurs within the days normally allotted to menstruation; this is the view of al-Shāfiʿī and Abū Ḥanīfah, and a similar opinion is reported from Mālik. The Mudawwanah records from Mālik that ṣufrah and kudrah are menstruation during the menstrual days and, outside those days, are likewise deemed menstruation whether or not the woman sees actual blood alongside them.

Dāwūd and Abū Yūsuf, however, said that ṣufrah and kudrah are not to be regarded as menstruation unless they are accompanied by a trace of real blood.

The root of their disagreement is the apparent conflict between the ḥadīth of Umm ʿAṭiyyah and that of ʿĀʾishah. Umm ʿAṭiyyah said, “We would not count yellowish or brownish discharge as anything after the ritual bath.” ʿĀʾishah, by contrast, related that women used to send to her cloths with cotton on which there were yellowish or brownish traces from menstrual blood, asking her about prayer; she would reply, “Do not be hasty until you see the white discharge of purity.”

Hence, those who accorded greater weight to ʿĀʾishah’s report judged ṣufrah and kudrah to be menstruation, whether they appear during the menstrual days or