After that, the new mother would resume her daily prayers whether her bleeding had stopped or not.38 There was no reliable Hadith anywhere on this topic. Yet we find chapters devoted to the issue in the canonical Hadith collections of the mid-ninth century, which feature several Hadiths on Nifas. These Hadiths then repeatedly appear as evidence in subsequent books of Shariah law. The main Hadith quotes the Prophet’s wife Umm Salama recalling that women in the Prophet’s time observed a forty-day break from prayers after childbirth. But none of these Hadiths in any way met even the lowest bar of
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