Islamic Period: Menstruation and Muslims in Pakistan Restricted; Files & ToC

Abstract

Menstruation is usually framed as a medicalized subject of hygiene or gynecology. It is investigated by gauging women’s use menstrual products like pads, cups, or tampons. In such literature, the menstruating body features as an embarrassing, leaky aberration. This dissertation writes against such framings and delves into the cultural valences of menstruation in the Islamic context of Pakistan. The contrasting relationship between menstrual guidance found in popular Islamic texts of Pakistan, and  the ordinary Pakistani women’s knowledge about menstrual conduct — generated in the home, amidst a public taboo — is the key focus of this study.

Ultimately, this study traces the creation and circulation of Islamic knowledge about menstruation in contemporary Pakistan. It is ethnographically based on the everyday ritual world of lower-income Muslim women in Karachi who are unassociated with mosques and madrasas, and questions how their ideas about good menstrual conduct contrasts with textual knowledge on menstruation produced by the ‘ulama. Menstruation (known as hayẓ in Urdu) is central to lower-income women’s aspirational Islamic life: practices of fasting, prayers, marriage, divorce, and pilgrimage are intimately governed by the timing, color, and volume of menstrual blood. The public taboo on menstruation, combined with the Islamic emphasis on it, presents a tension that is at the heart of this study. Through participant-observation in two localities of Karachi, this study explores how women draw on the Islamic teachings of menstruation in their everyday life to create kinship circuits of oral knowledge in the home; and what kind of voids within the ‘ulama’s teachings about menstruation are addressed by these circuits. Theoretically, this study highlights the traffic between menstrual biology and Islamic law by demonstrating how ordinary women draw on their menstrual experience to expand the doctrinal and legal scope of Islam in relation to ethics around new menstrual technologies, vulvo-vaginal care, ritual cleanliness (ṭahārat), herbal medicine (ṭibb), marital sexuality (izdavaji ta’alluq), and social conduct related to health and humanity. In a larger sense, this study challenges the gendered marginality of everyday domesticity as a passive or vacant receptor of religious pedagogies from male-dominated institutions. It treats menstruation as a metaphor of women’s obfuscation, representative of gendered relationships between the body and the society, on which much cultural and feminist work remains to be done.

 

Keywords: Menstruation, Islamic law, Ethnography, Pakistan.

 

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About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Islamic Civilizations Studies
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Islamic Studies Women's Studies Religion, General
Palavra-chave	Menstruation, Islam, Pakistan, Islamic Law, Islamic Purity
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Scott Kugle, Emory University

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