Photo: Candi Prambanan, Yogyakarta, 2016
For all the women who’re being paid their monthly week-long visit by Mr Red.
For me, Mr Red’s impeccable timing is always such that it hits me at the end of every month, which means that it usually comes right at the start of the last 10 days of every Ramadan, which it has, for the past few years. Very punctually as well.
When I get my period, I feel like my biggest accomplishment is getting through the day in one piece without sitting in one corner just cringing in pain. I have anemia, so on a normal basis my body is already weaker than average, and so when I get my periods, I’m extremely drained. A few days ago, it was so bad that my entire body started shaking, which doesn’t really happen, and it sent me scrambling to get some food and drink into my system. It stopped after a while, thankfully.
Then there are the headaches I wake up with in the morning, and all day long it feels like someone’s squeezing the arteries that are supposed to send blood to my brain. Then there’s the fatigue that sets in so quickly when you’re out and about trying to get things done. I was so tired yesterday that I ended up falling asleep on the couch for two hours after Maghrib.
But weakness has a way of bringing you to your knees and crushing you to remind you of who made you and where you’re returning to in the end. More often than not, His cure (shifa) comes packaged in what seems to be abrupt pain. Between the fatigue of a drained body and the constant, sharp strain of an aching head, I feel like He’s whispering to me through the veins that still course with life within, “Did you forget how to be thankful?” Perhaps I did. Forgive me.
I remember being out with a friend of mine once. I was having a particularly heavy period, and it had been a long day; I was exhausted and my headache was at the worst it had been the whole day. I was complaining to her about how tired I was. She sat there listening quietly to me. After a while, she told me that she hadn’t gotten her period in months, and that she’d recently been diagnosed with a particular disease that messed her period cycles up.
I saw the pain in her eyes even though she just sat across from me, laughing it off as if it were a joke.
I felt sick with shame. What had I just complained about?
Between the fatigue, lethargy, cramps, headaches, and hormonal imbalances that rage over a menstruating woman’s body, it is easy to overlook and undermine the sanctity of a woman’s body itself. Menstruation doesn’t render a woman’s entire being “dirty”, neither is it a sort of punishment for her that she’s excused from things like prayer, fasting, and reciting the Quran while she’s menstruating—it’s to make it easier on her to go through all of the natural pains that come with menstruation.
“When you go through all of the ugh of menstruating, remember, “Whatever befalls a Muslim of exhaustion, illness, worry, grief, nuisance or trouble, even though it may be no more than a prick of a thorn, earns him/her forgiveness by God of some of his/her sins” (Bukhari).” – Shaykha Maryam Amir (source: FB)
Technically, a menstruating woman is rewarded just for refraining from prayer, fasting, and so on. As one of the scholars of Damascus put it, “Her praying while pure is worship (ibada) and her refraining from prayer while menstruating is worship. All of it is worship.” (source: here)
Islamically, there is no notion of shame or punishment associated with menstruation, even though cultural misperceptions may introduce these negative elements into the equation.
Is it not absurd to resent the same God-given cycle that grants us women the ability to carry life in our wombs? Would the same God who showers food, drink, mercy and forgiveness upon us in infinite amounts, deprive us of Himself by default, every month for a week, just because? Is a woman’s period simply to be seen as the rent she has to pay just for being born a woman, and nothing else? No, it isn’t.
She carries something of the sacred within her, by virtue of the innate connection that her womb has to the Throne of Allah. And this is something I have to remind myself of every time I start to feel as though I’m being deprived of worship when the time of the month comes around. The reality of it is the exact opposite—it’s one of the most opportune windows of time for me to draw closer to my Creator.
“The womb is this barzakh, a place where the spirit and the material world are one. Only women know what it’s like to carry another soul inside of you, what it’s like for two spirits to share the same body. Men can only experience that if they travel the spiritual path and they unite with the Prophet SAW spiritually… If you read the hadith about the Throne, it’s an incredible being. It worships Allah. It’s luminous and full of Light. If a woman is connected to that, she becomes a direct manifestation of that praise, and that transcendence of the universe, and that Light, if she’s connected to it. And you can be connected to it. Men can be connected to it too, but for women it’s just easier.” – Shaykh Muhammad Mendes (source: Sout Ilaahi)
