The critique lands hard in two places: that Islamic ritual purity law treats natural bodily functions as spiritually polluting, and that it singles out women during menstruation as “impure” in a way that implies moral deficiency. Both readings are wrong, but they are wrong in ways that require explaining what the law is actually doing rather than simply asserting that the critics have misread it.
What ritual purity is and is not
Islamic purity law (tahara) distinguishes between physical cleanliness and ritual purity. Ritual purity — the state required for certain acts of worship — is not a statement about a person’s moral worth, their proximity to God, or their human dignity. It is a precondition for specific ritual acts in the same way that certain conditions are required for specific practical acts. A surgeon who has not scrubbed is not a lesser human being — they are in a state that is inappropriate for operating. A Muslim who has not performed wudu (ritual ablution) is not a worse person — they are not in the state required for salah.
This distinction — between ritual state and moral worth — is fundamental to understanding the law. The Quran does not say that a person in a state of ritual impurity is sinful, contaminated, or distant from God in any ultimate sense. It says they should not perform salah until they restore the ritual state. The two things are categorically different.
What the Quran actually says about menstruation
The Quranic term used for menstruation is adha — harm, discomfort, or difficulty. This is a consideration for the woman’s wellbeing, not a declaration of spiritual contamination. The instruction to men to “keep away” during this period is a directive about sexual intercourse during a time of physical discomfort — not a command to shun women as ritually dangerous. The verse continues: “When they have purified themselves, you may approach them in the manner God has ordained.” The frame is compassion and physical consideration, not pollution management.
Exemption versus punishment
During menstruation, Islamic law suspends the obligation of salah and fasting, and restricts certain interactions with the Quranic text in some juristic traditions. The suspension of obligation is significant: she is not failing to pray. She is exempt from prayer. The missed prayers are not made up after the period ends. This is the opposite of the treatment one would expect if menstruation were framed as a moral failure — sins require expiation, but exemptions from obligations do not. The woman is relieved of a duty, not penalised for a deficiency.
The embodied nature of worship
The question “why would God care about bodily functions?” rests on a misunderstanding of what the law is doing. Washing before prayer is not about being dirty in any moral sense. It is about transitioning — physically marking the shift from ordinary activity to the conscious act of standing before God. The body is involved because the person is embodied. That is not an insult to the body. It is an acknowledgment that embodied beings relate to the sacred through embodied practice.
This is not unique to Islam. Ritual washing appears in Judaism (mikveh), in Shinto purification rites, in Christian baptismal and pre-Eucharistic practices. The human instinct to mark the transition to sacred activity through physical preparation is neither primitive nor arbitrary. It is the recognition that the whole person — body and soul — is involved in the encounter with the divine.
Where the honest difficulty lies
It is honest to acknowledge that some applications of purity law in Muslim cultures — restrictions on menstruating women entering mosques in some traditions, certain strictures around physical contact — reflect cultural accretions that go beyond what the texts strictly require and that have caused real discomfort and shame for women. The tradition is not uniform on these questions; there is genuine jurisprudential debate about what the law requires and what is cultural interpretation layered on top of it.
The shame that some women feel around menstruation in Muslim contexts is not the teaching of the Quran. The Quran’s treatment is direct, dignified, and oriented toward the woman’s wellbeing. The shame is a product of how the topic has been handled — or not handled — in communities where bodily matters are treated as unmentionable. That is a failure of formation and pedagogy, not a feature of the law itself.