For most of my life, my body has insisted on being heard.

I was eleven when my periods first started, and from the outset, they were overwhelming. I curled around hot water bottles, swallowed painkillers, and counted the hours until the pain loosened its grip. The symptoms always came thick and fast: cramps, fatigue, bloating, headaches, brain fog, cravings. Yet the physical ordeal was only one layer, perhaps not even the most debilitating. 

In the days before bleeding, my emotional state shifted sharply. Inexplicable tears, restlessness and irritability, sleeplessness, everything hovering just beneath the surface.  For part of the month, I felt intact; for the other half, volatile – desperate to be left alone, unable to articulate why. Eventually, the pattern faded into background noise, ever-present but easier to normalise. 

Then, there were the thoughts. Intrusive. Frightening. Predictable in their timing. Thoughts of disappearing and not waking up. Thoughts I did not want, did not recognise, and did not feel safe confessing aloud. Each month, I explained them away as “just a part of womanhood.” But the truth was more unsettling: I did not always feel safe in my own mind. So I carried the silence alongside the pain. I did not have the language to describe what was happening. So, I did what girls are trained to do: I endured it quietly and called that maturity.

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Taahirah is a movement designed by and for Muslim women. It blends trusted Islamic and health guidance to support Muslim women’s health at every life stage – from menstruation to post-menopause. Alongside this sits a growing library of culturally and religiously sensitive educational resources that treat the physical, mental, and spiritual well-being as inseparable. 

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I have since been diagnosed with a rare autoimmune condition – and if there’s one thing that teaches you, early and often unwillingly, it’s how to listen to what the body needs, even when the systems around you have left you unequipped to respond. Over time, that condition has unfolded into a constellation of chronic illnesses. Each one has brought its own negotiations every single day, reshaping what ‘normal’ could realistically mean. Much of my daily life has been spent managing symptoms alongside ordinary responsibilities, translating complexity to clinicians unfamiliar with my case, and coordinating my care across services. 

More recently, I was hospitalised with a suspected brain haemorrhage. It was a moment that stripped away any illusion that endurance alone is virtuous. Instead, it returned me to a simpler truth: life itself flows from al-Ḥayy al-Qayyūm, upon whom both body and soul depend as utterly as breath upon air. Alhamdulillah, I came through it – shaken, but lucid. Yet what stayed with me was a Prophetic reminder we often quote lightly, but rarely sit with: “The body has rights over us.” (Bukhari)

Befittingly, the rights of Allah ﷻ are the greatest and most lofty of all rights. However, Islam is a faith of balance; operating at a mizan, it gives due weight to the body alongside the intellect, heart and soul. Physical well-being is not a distraction from devotion; it is among the means through which tranquillity and flourishing are made possible. Indeed, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ urged us to take care of five before five (Saheeh al-Jaami’, no. 1077) – health before sickness among them – for: 

“Whoever among you wakes up secure in his property, healthy in his body, and with food for the day, it is as if the whole world has been gathered for him.” (Ibn Majah)

For me, nothing rings more true. To inhabit a body that repeatedly falters is to become medically literate by necessity.

You learn to read closely, to interrogate evidence, to cross-check what you are told against what your body knows. Your questions become more precise, because vague ones are easy to dismiss. And advocacy, however exhausting, is without apology – the alternative being to disappear into the gaps.

Vulnerability and resilience arrive together, particularly when you are a ‘disabled’ Muslim woman navigating institutions never designed with you in mind. But this fluency did not begin with a diagnosis. Rather, much earlier. Whilst my adolescence was plagued with gruelling medical symptoms, I was raised in a home shaped by Qurʾanic and Prophetic love from a young age. Womanhood was openly shared through storytelling and embodied by my grandmothers, mother and sister – more so as I grew older. Yet, the taboo shrouding women’s health, shaped by the intersection of being British, South Asian and Muslim, often took my words away before I knew how to form them. In my fear, I turned outwards for education. 

At school, menstrual education was delivered in detached, decontextualised forms – technical, sexually ambiguous, and ethically alien. We learned about periods the way we learned about photosynthesis through diagrams, definitions, and colour-coded cycles. You bleed. You ovulate. It repeats. What it felt like to live inside a body governed by this rhythm was irrelevant as the knowledge was designed for exams, rather than self-understanding. I memorised facts, but I had no framework to recognise when something was wrong – or that ‘wrong’ might warrant care.

The masjid offered little more clarity. Girls disappeared from class once a month, or remained present but silent during Qurʾan recitation and prayer. Fiqh (Islamic Law) was often introduced as a threshold of accountability after bulugh: rules to memorise, dangers to avoid, and the sudden weight of being responsible before Allah.

Too often, fear preceded mercy, an approach that reflected poor pedagogy and culture (shaped by socio-historical, political and patriarchal conditions), not the Prophetic legacy itself.

As a Muslim girl, I was acutely conscious of my akhlaq and adab. But when my emotions seemed uncontrollable, my iman felt compromised. I worried that my inability to “just be patient” revealed weakness in my faith. No one offered a medical lens. Rarely was a spiritual one offered, either, one capable of holding womanhood without collapsing it into guilt. 

Years later, I was diagnosed with Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), a severe hormonal condition. However, by then, the pattern had followed me into adulthood. It had simply learned new disguises. After I married at twenty-one, I entered a new stage of life with patchy reproductive knowledge. But I knew I wanted to approach family planning more deliberately. I booked appointments, asked questions and ruled out options slowly, trying to choose with care and evidence. Unfortunately, I experienced subsequent months of continuous bleeding and unpalatable side effects. But what startled me most was the faith-based disorientation that followed. 

The cycle that had anchored my understanding of fiqh for years became erratic. Rulings I had studied in textbooks collided with lived reality and dissolved into ambiguity. In theory, Islamic rulings on women’s health are often dismissed as clear-cut. In practice, (particularly alongside conditions such as endometriosis, miscarriage, postpartum bleeding, or menopause) clarity gives way to layers. 

I kept returning to questions that felt embarrassingly basic, yet unanswered: 

• When does my period end Islamically so I can pray again? 
• How do I make up for missed fasts with an irregular cycle? 
• How do I develop an Islamic understanding of my physical, mental, spiritual and sexual health? 

The resources available to me were discordant: hyper-sexualised health apps, faith-conflicting advice, and unverified social media threads. Slowly, it became clear that these questions were not personal failures. Rather, a residual outcome of structural deficiency. 

Building in a Broken System

Women’s health has long been a historical afterthought. Relegated to the outskirts of public discourse, its neglect mirrors broader inequities. The female body was not afforded intelligent inquiry, but tethered to its suspect reproductive system – cast as unstable and deviant. In ancient Greek and Egyptian medicine, the uterus was imagined as a ‘wandering’ organ, its supposed ‘sadness’ blamed for physical and emotional disturbance. Medieval Europe further moralised infertility, miscarriage and complicated pregnancy outcomes as divine judgement. By the nineteenth century, Victorian medicine consolidated ‘hysteria’ as a diagnostic catch-all, legitimising invasive interventions such as bloodletting, leeching, and ovariotomy (the removal of normal ovaries, known as Battey’s Operation). Meanwhile, legitimate neurological and endocrine conditions were dismissed or misclassified. Menstruation itself remained cloaked in euphemism – ‘monthly sickness,’ ‘female degeneration’ – particularly as women approached menopause. 

Muslim women encountered these frameworks through the added violence of colonialism. From the early Middle Ages onwards, Islam was constructed as antithetical to Western civilisation. Muslim women were propagandised into the sexualised Orient, militant terrorists, or oppressed captives in need of rescue.

Colonial regimes weaponised reproduction through population control, gynaecological experimentation, eugenics, and forced sterilisation. In Britain, these logics resurfaced in practices such as the ‘virginity testing’ of Muslim women in the 1970s, where women’s bodies became sites of state surveillance. 

This history is not past us. It is sedimented into contemporary healthcare. 

Today, women remain underrepresented in clinical research. Male data is often used as a proxy for female solutions, and female-specific symptoms are routinely dismissed as ‘hormonal’ or ‘psychosomatic.’ This male-centred system results in a vacuum of evidence, delayed diagnoses and poorer health outcomes. Muslim women sit at the sharpest edge of these disparities. Muslim households are twice as likely to experience poverty, a factor closely linked to higher rates of chronic illness and disability. Black and South Asian women face well-documented gaps in gynaecological treatment. Preferences for female clinicians are inconsistently accommodated, and racialised diagnostic shorthand further distorts clinical judgment. Terms such as ‘Bibi-itis’ or ‘Begum syndrome’ (drawn from common South Asian honorifics) are used pejoratively to trivialise pain as cultural exaggeration, and delay appropriate care.

Fragmentation compounds this harm. There is no coherent ecosystem for women’s health that takes faith seriously. Most digital platforms are built on secular-liberal assumptions of womanhood, leaving little room for religious identity. Muslim women describe discomfort with sexualised interfaces, culturally alien content, opaque algorithms, and data misuse scandals. 

In response, I sought an approach that could hold all of this together simultaneously. One that could honour Muslim women’s heterogeneity without forcing one identity to flatten the other. 

And that search did not end in theory. This space is now the focus of my research at Princeton: tracing how Muslim women’s reproductive health is shaped by educational gaps, service design, and digital infrastructures – and what it would mean to build systems fit for our lived realities. Wa bi tawfiqillah, I hope to share this work more fully soon. 

Taahirah Health 

I did not set out to found the infrastructure that may answer my own questions. Doing so would have required a visible redirection of my path and airing my vulnerability publicly. 

Growing up in Newham, East London, I carried so many dreams carefully. I also wore multiple hats: a British-Bangladeshi woman from a working-class background, and later, one of only two visibly Muslim women across my Oxbridge cohorts. With that came the constant weight of representation. I could not afford to fail loudly. So I overachieved and set my sights on the Bar. Building technology was nowhere on my tradition-set radar. 

And yet, in retrospect, the foundations were informally there. For years, I had tried carving out spaces for Muslim women to thrive. Community-building became instinctive long before it became intentional. And these seeds potentially gave root to Taahirah. 

One sleepless night, after submitting my Master’s thesis during a flare-up, I found myself sketching app ideas and logos. What started as a moment of restlessness (trying to make sense of accumulated questions) slowly became a turning point. A spontaneous application to the Collective Continuum Spark Award took me to Doha, where I pitched Taahirah as a finalist. We did not win. But, alhamdullilah, we did not stop. Taahirah grew from an idea into a venture with purpose. At its core is a commitment to reclaiming an Islamic narrative that honours women’s bodies. The Qurʾan situates womanhood within rahma. The very word rahm (womb) shares its root with two of Allah’s  most invoked names, al-Rahman (the Most Merciful) and al-Rahim (the Most Compassionate).

Allah reminds us, “And Allah brought you out of the wombs of your mothers while you knew nothing and gave you hearing, sight, and intellect, so perhaps you would be thankful.” (Surah An-Nahl 16:78)

The Prophet’s ﷺ legacy embodied this ethic. Menstruation was affirmed as, “A matter Allah has decreed for the daughters of Adam.” (An-Nasai)

Women are rewarded for lovingly submitting in all circumstances – whether through acts of worship when commanded or refraining when prohibited. 

This tradition did not discourage questions; it dignified them. The Prophet ﷺ taught that, “The cure for ignorance is asking,” (Ibn Majah) and the Qurʾan instructs believers to turn to people of knowledge when they do not know (Surah An-Nahl 16:4).

He ﷺ even set aside time specifically for women to ask questions openly. The hadith literature records the many personal questions asked by female companions, who set a lasting example for appropriate knowledge seeking:

• A’ishah RA praised the women of the Ansar because modesty did not prevent them from seeking knowledge. 
• Fatimah bint Abi Hubaysh RA asked about continuous bleeding, and the Prophet ﷺ explained how to distinguish true menses from non-menstrual bleeding and when prayer could resume. 
• Asmaʾ bint Shakal RA asked about washing after menstruation; the Prophet ﷺ described the process clearly. When she asked further about specifics, Aʾishah RA responded. 
• A woman experiencing mental distress wished to ask the Prophetﷺa question privately. Anas RA reports that the Prophet ﷺ told her to choose any street where he could meet her. He answered her question in a public space, but in a way that respected her privacy. 

This lineage was subsequently carried into the works of classical jurists and physicians of the Islamic Golden Age. Scholars like Ibn Sina, Al-Zahrawi, and Al-Razi developed frameworks that interwove legal, spiritual and medical knowledge. Women’s health was treated as a legitimate field of inquiry.

Taahirah revives this heritage. We recognise our natural, biological cycles as part of Allah’s wisdom and mercy, and encourage women to draw closer to Him throughout womanhood.

Our primary innovation is a faith-led cycle tracker that helps women: 

• Log cycles with precision, and receive predictions adapted to your chosen madhhab (to help distinguish between ḥayḍ, ṭahārah, and istiḥāḍah) 
• Record symptoms and receive cycle phase-specific insights that nourish body, mind, and soul 
• Track prayers and know when to perform ghusl and resume worship. ● Log missed fasts and schedule make-up days in your calendar, to prompt structure and proactiveness. 
• Receive timely notifications for your prayers, ghusl, fasting, cycle updates, and more – so you are never caught off guard again. 

Alongside this sits a growing library of culturally and religiously sensitive educational resources that treat the physical, mental, and spiritual well-being as inseparable. In the future, our plans are bright: to give Muslim women the community, education, and tools to make confident health and faith decisions in harmony. 

Sometimes I wonder how differently my adolescence might have unfolded had I been taught to understand my body earlier. I am still learning what balance looks like. But I am no longer lost in the dark. I know that there is nothing immodest about understanding the body that Allah entrusted to us. 

Islam does not ask women to be ignorant of themselves to be faithful. Rather, knowledge can enable beautiful healing. The Prophet ﷺ said, “Seek treatment, O servants of Allah, for Allah has not created a disease except that He has also created its cure.” (Ibn Majah)

To tend to the body is not to diminish the soul; it is to honour a trust. My body still insists on being heard. I am learning to listen without fear. If Taahirah is the first step, let it not be the last. 

May Allah grant us health, strengthen our iman, and allow us to serve the women of this Ummah with sincerity and excellence.

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References

1. Lyndsey Fletcher, “Women’s Health: From the Wandering Uterus to the 21st Century – Front Line Genomics,” Front Line Genomics, May 9, 2023
2. Taahirah, “‘We Aren’t Taught about These Things When Young’: Muslim Women’s Menstrual Health Challenges and Tech-Based Solutions | Taahirah,” Taahirah.health, January 14, 2025 
3. Zaidat Ibrahim et al., “‘Islamically, I Am Not on My Period’: A Study of Menstrual Tracking in Muslim Women in the US,” Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 16 (May 11, 2024): 1–16
4. Royal College of Nursing, “The Wandering Womb | Library | Royal College of Nursing,” The Royal College of Nursing, 2019 
5. Thomas Schlich, “Cutting the Body to Cure the Mind,” The Lancet Psychiatry 2, no. 5 (May 2015): 390–92
6.  Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); 
7. Irene Zempi, “The Lived Experiences of Veiled Muslim Women as ‘Undeserving’ Victims of Islamophobia,” (Policy Press, July 4, 2018).
8. Tlaleng Mofokeng, “Reclaiming Sexual and Reproductive Rights through a Decolonial Lens,” Health and Human Rights 27, no. 1 (June 2025): 91. 
9. Alan Travis, “Virginity Tests for Immigrants ‘Reflected Dark Age Prejudices’ of 1970s Britain,” The Guardian, May 8, 2011, sec. UK news, 
10. Muslim Census, “Muslims and the Cost of Living Crisis – Report,” 2022. 
11. Muslim Women’s Council, “‘The NHS Is Structurally Racist’: Ethnic Disparities in Women’s Healthcare,” 2025, 
12. Jamila Sherif, “The Impact of Unconscious Bias on Muslim Women’ s Experiences of Healthcare – BJGP Life,” BJGP Life, 2021, 
13. Sunan an-Nasa’i 279 ‘Chapter 177, Book 1: The Book of Purification’
14. Sahih al-Bukhari 297 ‘Chapter 3, Book 6: Menstrual Periods’
15. Sahih al-Bukhari 294 ‘Chapter 1, Book 6: Menstrual Periods’
16. Sahih al-Bukhari 298 ‘Chapter 4, Book 6: Menstrual Periods’
17. Muḥammad Akram Nadwī, Al-Muḥaddithāt: The Women Scholars in Islam (Oxford: Interface Publications, 2016)