microbes and deadly pathogens that water alone cannot eliminate unless earth is used together with it; exalted is the All-Knowing, the All-Aware!

10 – The outward sense of the ḥadith is that it applies to every dog, and this is the view held by the majority. Some scholars, however, maintained that the dog one is permitted to keep for hunting, farming, or guarding livestock is excluded from that general ruling, invoking the juristic maxim that the law is gentle and easy—hardship brings about facilitation.

11 – Our Shāfiʿī jurists have classed the pig with the dog in the severity of its impurity and in the ruling that its impurity be washed in the same fashion. Most other scholars disagreed, refusing to equate the pig’s impurity with that of the dog in requiring seven washings and the use of earth, restricting themselves to the explicit wording of the text, for the rationale behind the dog’s heightened impurity is not evident. In Sharḥ al-Muhadhdhab it states: “Seven washings are not obligatory for the impurity of a pig; this is the view better supported by the evidence and is the preferred opinion, for the default is that nothing is obligatory until the Lawgiver imposes it.”

12 – Scholars differed over whether employing earth is mandatory. The Ḥanafīs and Mālikīs held that what is obligatory are the seven washings, whereas including earth among them is not, citing the variation among the reports as to which washing contains the earth: in some it is the first, in others the last, and in yet others it is left unspecified—“in one of them.” Because of this variation, the evidence was deemed insufficient to establish the obligation of earth, and the default is non-obligation. In contrast, al-Shāfiʿī, Aḥmad, their followers, most of the Ẓāhirīs, Isḥāq, Abū ʿUbayd, Abū Thawr, Ibn Jarīr, and others stipulated the use of earth, holding that the dog’s impurity is not removed without it, on the strength of the sound texts on the matter. As for the claim that the reports are inconsistent, it is rejected, for a narration is only dismissed for inconsistency when the competing versions are equal in weight; when, as in this ḥadith, one version clearly outweighs the others, judgment is rendered in favor of the stronger narration, as is well established.