In the name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful.

Section
The Rulings of Islamic Law Concerning Ablution and Other Acts of Worship

The rulings of Islamic law fall into five categories: obligatory, recommended, permissible, forbidden, and disliked.

An obligatory act is defined as one that is forbidden to omit. Another definition is an act whose omission—together with the omission of its substitute, if it has one—Allah has threatened to punish. The first definition is more concise, while the second is clearer. The purpose of this qualification is that some acts of worship have no substitute, such as washing the face, so omitting them renders a person liable to punishment. Others have a substitute, such as washing the feet: a person is liable to punishment only if he omits both washing them and wiping over leather socks, which is the substitute for washing.

The obligatory has five names: wājib (obligatory), fard (prescribed), hatm (binding), lāzim (incumbent), and maktūb (ordained). All have a basis in the Quran. It falls into three categories: that which is obligatory by the Quran, that which is obligatory by the Sunnah, and that which is obligatory by consensus. All are alike in that failure to comply incurs sin. They differ only in the degree of punishment threatened for omission: one sin may be greater than another, even though the lesser, considered on its own, is grave.

In our view, wājib and fard are equivalent, contrary to the position of the scholars of Iraq, who hold that fard is more emphatically binding than wājib, and that fard is what is made obligatory by the Quran, whereas wājib is what is made obligatory by the Sunnah and consensus.