by Sahnūn, “He used to hold a different view, then reverted to] this”—that is, to the view that he should bathe—what it means is: he used to hold that a person in a state of major ritual impurity should never perform tayammum, but then adopted the position related here from him, Mālik and Sa‘īd ibn al-Musayyab: if he performs tayammum and prays, then finds water, he must bathe.
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Although, according to Mālik and his companions, tayammum does not remove ritual impurity at all, they hold that it permits everything permitted by ablution and ritual bathing: obligatory and voluntary prayers, reciting the Quran from a written text or from memory, prostration upon recitation, and similar acts prohibited by major ritual impurity or by the minor ritual impurity that invalidates ablution. Some scholars, including ‘Abd al-‘Azīz ibn Abī Salama, held that it does not permit voluntary prayer.
Those who hold that tayammum removes both kinds of ritual impurity regard it as a true substitute for both ablution and ritual bathing. Those who hold that it removes minor but not major ritual impurity regard it as a true substitute for ablution. Those who hold that it removes neither kind of ritual impurity and permits only obligatory prayers regard it as a substitute for neither ablution nor bathing, but merely as permission to pray lest the prayer’s time expire.
As for the position that tayammum permits everything prohibited by ritual impurity without removing that impurity, one view is that it merely permits those acts and is not a substitute for purification with water, since it does not remove ritual impurity as purification with water does. Another view is that it is a substitute for both ablution and bathing, even though it does not remove ritual impurity. This is the more evident view.
The evidence for this is that the original rule required purification with water—or tayammum when water was unavailable—for every prayer, according to the apparent meaning of Allah’s words—exalted is He:
“O you who believe, when you rise for prayer, wash your faces” [al-Mā’idah: 6], and the remainder of the verse.
The Sunnah then exempted purification with water from this general rule: on the day of the conquest of Mecca, the Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—performed the prayers with a single ablution. Tayammum, however, remained subject to the original rule, since a substitute does not have the full force of that which it replaces.
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If, then, we hold that tayammum permits acts that may otherwise be performed only after purification with water, the acts it permits