This paper focuses on menstrual regulations (hayd) in Islamic law and society by engaging in a close-reading of select passages from legal and non-legal texts of the “early” and “middle” period of Islam. Its aim is to illustrate the wide-ranging effects of menstrual laws on the lives of Muslim women and to anticipate what is at stake in the making of menstrual laws against the backdrop of discourses on purity and pollution. Therefore, this paper contributes to our understanding of the nexus of menstrual regulations in Islamic law and configurations of womanhood in Muslim societies by thinking through menstrual laws as gendering practices. I argue that Islamic menstrual regulations and even prohibitions are not merely restricting, but, instead, can be thought of as creating opportunities for solidarity between men and women (“cycling together”). I show that while menstrual laws primarily affect women, coercing their exclusion from rituals such as prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage, menstrual laws yield the effect of producing in the sexes a sense of self that is defined around the absence of the opposite sex. I argue that menstrual laws produce male-centered ritual in which the recurring physical absence of single female bodies makes known to men the internal capacities of the female body (its ability to menstruate) and the internal capacities of their own male body (its inability to menstruate). Ritual performance, then, engenders forms of collectivized dependency among males and females, based on their recognition of sameness with other bodies that are either incapable of menstruating (in the case of men) or with bodies that are capable of menstruating (in the case of women). I conclude that Islamic menstruation laws constituted a site of gendering and continued negotiation of the interests of both sexes, creating gendered ritual practice based on the capacity or incapacity of bodies to menstruate. This paper builds on the yet little number of studies on menstruation in Islam by thinking through menstrual laws alongside menstruation theories (Strathern, Hippocrates, Freud, Montgomery, Bettelheim) attempting to contribute to a theory of menstruation in Islamic contexts. Meanwhile, it pushes us to think through menstrual regulations as enabling practices that engendered new forms of personhood and subjectivities. This paper employs Malik b. Anas’ Muwatta' as well as select passages from Abu Dawud’s Sahih Sunan, al-Nawawi’s Minhaj al-Talibin, Abu l-Husayn 'Ali b. Sa'id al-Rajraji’s Manahij al-tahsil, and the Tafsir-works of al-Bukhari and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi.