the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him): “This is something Allah has decreed for the daughters of Adam.”

Likewise, how often does one find a woman who menstruates for fifteen or nineteen days, or a woman with continuous non-menstrual bleeding who has no known menstrual pattern and whose blood cannot be distinguished by its colour? Rather, when non-menstrual bleeding occurs, for most women the distinction between the types of blood coincides with their usual menstrual pattern. The ruling in such cases is established by mass-transmitted reports from the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) and by the agreement of the jurists.

We have discussed death, which inevitably comes to everyone—and few people die without leaving something behind—and menstruation, which women ordinarily experience. The same applies to all other common categories of matters, such as marriage and its attendant matters, sales and their attendant matters, acts of worship, and offences.

If someone says that questions involving independent juristic reasoning and disagreement are exceedingly numerous in these areas of jurisprudence, the answer is that questions established with certainty, by explicit texts, and by consensus are many times more numerous