Islamic Center of Southern California

The Arguments of Islamic Law Rulings on Recent Medical Issues

Topic Twenty Three

Minimum and Maximum Menses and Menstrual Cycle Estimation

Definition

Menses is menstruation or the menstrual period, and its first occurrence signifies coming of age for the girl concerned. The period between the beginning and stop of menses is looked at as the period of fertility. The period that includes one instance of menses and the following freedom from menses is called menstrual cycle.

When a girl comes of age, many complex changes occur in all her physical systems, particularly the nervous and the genital, and more specifically in the uterus and ovaries. With these changes, a girl is no longer a child; she is a full-fledged female.

With menopause, many changes also occur, one of which is the permanent ending of menstruation. This ending is usually gradual, with menses occurring once every two or three months and then every six months, and then it ends altogether. Bleeding between two menstruation periods is either a hemorrhage or false menstruation.

It is well known that when menses occurs early in a girl's life, menopause is late to come, and the opposite is true.

The Legal Position Chosen by the IOMS and Its Argument

The recommendations of the third seminar, held in 1987, include the following:

The Minimum Menstrual Period and the Maximum Menstrual Cycle

Physicians endorsed one of the viewpoints of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), the one which holds that the minimum menstruation is a single drop, while the maximum has to be determined in reference to each individual case.

Medically, false menstruation is abnormal bleeding that signifies illness. Its medical causes are diverse. The dividing line between normal bleeding, i.e. menstruation, and abnormal bleeding, i.e. false menstruation, is not clear cut; there is a one-to-three day margin. One must take into account other signs of illness, such as heavy bleeding and the presence of other symptoms, and the results of clinical examination or laboratory tests.

The seminar recommends that Muslim physicians address the questions of the distinction between menstruation and false menstruation and of the maximum duration of menstruation, through conducting the necessary research.

As for the duration of a menstrual cycle, which is from the beginning of a period of menses to the beginning of the following one - when the cycle is normal, that is when the ovaries release ova, in the case of most women the cycle is twenty eight days. The minimum cycle duration is three weeks, and the maximum is indeterminate. Islamic Center of Southern California