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The ḥadith further shows that it is permissible to touch an impure substance in order to remove it and purify the place it contaminated. Among the evidences for this ruling are the legitimacy of istinjāʾ (washing the private parts after relieving oneself) and the washing of other impurities.
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Al-Bukhārī’s recension is unrestricted, covering clarified butter whether melted or solid. The transmissions of Aḥmad and al-Nasāʾī limit the ruling to solid clarified butter; yet leading ḥadith critics such as al-Bukhārī and Abū Ḥātim judged the phrase “in solid clarified butter” to be a mistake.
Al-Tirmidhī said, “I heard al-Bukhārī state: it is an error; the correct wording is what al-Zuhrī related from ʿUbayd Allāh, from Ibn ʿAbbās, from Maymūnah.”
He added, “It is a ḥadith that has not been reliably preserved.”
Ibn al-Qayyim observed: “Scholars disagreed about this ḥadith, both in its chain of transmission and its text. Yet the foremost ḥadith authorities criticized it and did not deem it sound; rather, they considered it sheer error. Many specialists therefore regarded the version, ‘If the butter is solid, remove the mouse and whatever surrounds it and eat it; but if it is melted, do not go near it,’ as ill-founded and defective, for people have only narrated it from Sufyān on the authority of al-Zuhrī without that detail, just as al-Bukhārī and others reported.”