Irregular bleeding (istiḥāḍa) and any yellowish (ṣufrah) or brownish (kudrah) discharge are, in Mālik’s view, classed as menstruation whether they appear during a woman’s usual period days or outside them. Some later Mālikīs limited that ruling to the days of the regular period and not to other times, while others held that such discharges never take the ruling of menstruation at all. The first of these two latter opinions is the settled conclusion of his school.

The Mālikī jurists differ over the shortest interval of purity that a divorced woman may count toward her waiting-period. Some set it at seven or eight days, others at ten, others at five, and still others at fifteen days—the last figure being the view adopted by most scholars. There is, however, no upper limit to the length of a woman’s purity.

With regard to post-partum bleeding (nifās), there is no minimum. Mālik and a group of Hijazi jurists fix the maximum at sixty days, whereas several Companions—an opinion also shared by al-Layth—place it at forty days. Another report from Mālik refers the matter back to what women commonly experience.

Muḥammad ibn Maslamah stated that the longest a woman menstruates is fifteen days and the shortest is three. Other scholars of Medina said that the minimum is one full day and night.

Because they differ over the minimum period of purity, each group applies its view when examining the interval between two episodes of bleeding. If the interval meets the required minimum, the blood that follows is deemed a fresh menstruation. If it is shorter than that minimum, the interval is disregarded, the first and second bleedings are combined and treated as a single interrupted period, and the woman must bathe once the blood ceases and a period of purity—whether a day or more—sets in, after which she prays. Should the bleeding return, she stops praying again and adds the new days to her previous bleeding, counting them all as one menstruation. If, by doing so, the total exceeds the legal maximum for menstruation, the excess is treated as istiḥāḍa.

A woman experiencing istiḥāḍa has the ruling of ritual purity: she performs the prayer, fasts, and her husband may have marital relations with her.

Women’s menstruation, then, falls into various categories: