of ablution, for the Almighty says,
“Wash your faces”
(Qur’an 5:6).
Within this obligation they disputed three specific points:
- washing the strip of skin—the “white area” that lies between the side-burn and the ear;
- washing the portion of the beard that hangs below the chin; and
- running one’s fingers through the beard (takhlīl).
The well-known position in the Mālikī school is that the white area between the side-burn and the ear is not part of the face. Some Mālikīs, however, distinguish between a beardless man and one who has a beard, which yields three opinions in the school.
Abū Ḥanīfah and al-Shāfiʿī maintained that this area is part of the face.
As for the beard that hangs down, Mālik held that water must be passed over it, whereas Abū Ḥanīfah and al-Shāfiʿī—according to one of the latter’s two opinions—did not obligate that.
The cause of their divergence in these two matters is the subtlety of the lexical question: does the Arabic word “face” encompass those two areas or not?
Regarding the interlacing of the beard with one’s fingers, Mālik was of the view that it is not obligatory; the same was said by Abū Ḥanīfah and al-Shāfiʿī with respect to wuḍūʾ, while Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam, one of Mālik’s companions, deemed it obligatory.
Their disagreement here returns to the reliability of the reports commanding takhlīl of the beard. The majority hold those reports to be unsound, and the authentic narrations that describe the Prophet’s ablution—peace and blessings be upon him—contain no mention of such interlacing.
Fifth Issue under the Definition of the Bodily Parts
The scholars concur that washing the hands and forearms is among the obligatory elements of wuḍūʾ, because the Exalted One says,
“and your hands up to the elbows”
(Qur’an 5:6).
They differed, however, over whether the elbows themselves must be included. The majority—Mālik, al-Shāfiʿī, and Abū Ḥanīfah among them—consider inclusion obligatory, whereas the literalists, some later Mālikīs, and al-Ṭabarī hold that it is not.
The reason for their disagreement lies in the ambiguity of the preposition ilā (“up to”) and of the word yad (“hand”) in Arabic usage. The preposition ilā sometimes marks a limit, and sometimes conveys the sense of “along with.” The term yad likewise occurs in three senses: the palm alone, the palm and forearm, or the palm, forearm, and upper arm.
Thus, whoever understood ilā to mean “with,” or took yad to signify all three sections of the arm, held that the elbows must be washed. But whoever understood ilā as a mere boundary marker and restricted yad to the parts below the elbow—while regarding the boundary itself as outside what is bounded—did not require washing the elbows.
Muslim records in his Ṣaḥīḥ, on the authority of Abū Hurayrah, that he “washed his right arm until he began rinsing into the upper arm, then the left likewise; then washed his right foot until he rinsed into the calf, then the left likewise, and said, ‘This is how I saw the Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—perform ablution.’”