The scholars therefore disagreed over how these reports should be interpreted and how they might be reconciled with the analogy just cited. Mālik concluded from the command to pour out a dog’s leftover water (suʾr) and wash the vessel that the matter is a devotional act with no underlying rationale, and that the water itself is not impure. In the famous view reported from him he did not require the disposal of anything other than water into which a dog had lapped. As we have noted, he was influenced by the analogy that opposed such disposal, and by his belief that were the dog itself deemed intrinsically impure this would contradict the apparent meaning of the Qur’an—

“So eat of what they catch for you” (5:4)

—for had the dog been impure in itself, the game it seized would have become impure through mere contact. He reinforced this interpretation by pointing out that the ḥadīth prescribes a fixed number of washings, whereas the cleansing of impurities is not normally tied to any set count; hence, the washing here must be a pure act of worship. He paid no heed to the other reports because he judged them weak.

Al-Shāfiʿī, on the other hand, made the dog an exception among living creatures. He saw the plain sense of the ḥadīth as establishing the impurity of its suʾr, holding—so far as I understand—that the impurity resides in the saliva, not in the animal’s very being, and that any game the dog catches must therefore be washed. He likewise excepted the pig on the strength of the previously mentioned verse.

Abū Ḥanīfah contended that the point conveyed by the reports declaring the suʾr of beasts of prey, cats, and dogs impure is really the prohibition of eating their flesh; this, he said, is a case where specific wording is meant to express a general rule. Accordingly he maintained, “The ruling on suʾr follows the ruling on an animal’s flesh.” Some jurists, however, excluded the dog, the cat, and the wild beasts, adhering to the literal sense of the pertinent ḥadīths.

Others declared the suʾr of dogs and cats pure, excluding only beasts of prey. Concerning the dog they reasoned from the stipulated number of washings, from the conflict with the Qur’an’s outward sense, and from the ḥadīth of Abū Qatādah, which explained the cat’s purity on the ground that “she is among those that roam about among you,” while the dog too is a creature that roams.

With respect to the cat, they preferred the ḥadīth of Abū Qatādah to the report of Qurrah from Ibn Sīrīn, and the report of Ibn ʿUmar to that of ʿUmar and similar narrations, because Abū Qatādah’s report contradicts them by its implicit indication: once the cat’s purity was explained by her roaming nature, it was understood that whatever does not roam—namely, the beasts of prey—has forbidden suʾr. Among those who adopted this view was Ibn al-Qāsim.

Abū Ḥanīfah, as already noted, held the dog’s suʾr to be impure, yet he did not consider the specified number of washings a condition for purifying the vessel from which it had lapped. Analogy with other impurities, in his view, requires only that the substance itself be removed. This reflects his habitual refusal to accept solitary reports when they conflict with foundational principles.

The Qāḍī remarked: he accepted part of the ḥadīth and set aside whatever elements the principles contradicted, supporting his stance by citing it as the opinion of Abū Hurayrah, the very narrator of the tradition.

These are the factors that led the jurists to such extensive disagreement on this issue and caused them to diverge in their rulings. The question is purely a matter of ijtihād, and it is difficult to establish a decisive preference.

Perhaps the sounder view is that the dog, the pig, and the polytheist should be excluded from the general purity of animals’ suʾr, on account of the authentic