For Muslim women navigating faith, culture, and their bodies, mainstream fem tech has never quite fit. A handful of apps are now offering an alternative.
For many women, period tracker apps are a part of everyday life. Now advances in faith-aligned apps are dismantling taboos for Muslim women around their sexual and reproductive health.
Unlike mainstream fem tech apps currently on the market, platforms such as AYDA and Afifa – both founded in Canada – and London-based Taahirah, offer a countercultural alternative.
Mainstream tracker apps in the West tend to take a sexually permissive approach to women’s health, while these Muslim women-led platforms deliver spiritual guidance to support women’s wellbeing as part of a more global approach.
For Sainab Hassan, 19, a student from Bristol, her relationship with her body has been redefined over the past six months as a result. “In specific cultures, when talking about women’s sexual health,” she says, “we are told not to talk about it because it’s ‘shameful’.”
For years, she lived with the impression that her mood swings were a sign that she was spiritually lacking, put down to a sign that she was not strong in her faith. She now understands the medical explanation for her hormonal fluctuations. Through the AYDA app, she navigates everyday Islamic practice alongside advice on diet, prayer, and exercise.
AYDA founder Aqsha Adam, 32, launched the app in the summer of 2025 after three years of development in Toronto, Canada. At the time, the apps she was using were not spiritually aligned with her needs – lacking, for example, the Islamic cleansing practice, ghusl, where the entire body is cleansed under running water at the conclusion of a cycle.
“As Muslim women, we have a different approach, where we believe that our bodies are sacred and created by God, by Allah, and meant to be taken care of in a way that aligns with that,” she says. With thousands of downloads worldwide, her users are predominantly women across the US, UK, and Europe, aged between 20 and 40.
While Taahirah and Afifa focus more on wellbeing advice, AYDA users also have the option to track their own period while sharing their cycle with their romantic partner. While the concept might seem invasive, Bibi Takwah Ahmad, 24, from Toronto, says that the tool allows her partner to better understand and support her emotionally at every point of her cycle. The app assists women during religious holidays, too. During Ramadan, women who are exempt from fasting during menstruation can track their “missed fasts”.
Muslim women comprise roughly one billion of the world’s population. Yet women, especially ethnic minority women, have been underrepresented in clinical trials and medical research. Due preferences for female doctors and tension around intimate appointments further sidelines Muslim women from receiving medical care, with 30 per cent of them less likely to book cervical cancer smear tests than the UK general population, according to the British Islamic Medical Association (BIMA).
But practical health advice on contraception, abortion and sexually transmitted infections remains limited on these platforms, which are not advertised as medical apps. Afifa, for example, has only two points of pregnancy-related advice mainly focusing on Islamic rulings around nifas (post-partum bleeding). The Taahirah app has a paywall blocking content on sexual health, pregnancy, mental health, and menopause; AYDA even has the option to hide sexual health information before accessing the app.
Despite their lack of comprehensive resources, Adam says that such apps seek to address the cultural shame and misunderstanding of women’s health alongside the loss of a rich lineage of Islamic gynaecological knowledge, such as the practice of eating dates to alleviate pregnancy symptoms – an age-old Islamic practice that was recently endorsed by Western medicine. Both AYDA and Taahirah also hosts women’s health workshops, partnering with medical practitioners to provide advice and supplies to women in Vancouver and London.
“We are reclaiming our body,” says Adam, “our wellness for ourselves as Muslim women.”
Featured Image Credit: Pixababy
