Second Issue under the Legal Rulings
The jurists disagreed about washing the hand before dipping it into the vessel used for wuḍūʾ. One group held that this washing is an unqualified Sunnah of ablution—even when one is certain the hand is clean—and this is the well-known position of Mālik and al-Shāfiʿī. According to another report, it is merely recommended for the person who doubts the hand’s purity; this view is also related from Mālik. A third opinion says that washing the hand is obligatory for anyone who has just awakened from sleep, the stance adopted by Dāwud and his followers. Yet another group drew a distinction between night-sleep and day-sleep, making the washing obligatory after night-sleep but not after daytime sleep; this was the view of Aḥmad.
Thus four opinions emerge:
- It is Sunnah in every case;
- It is recommended for one who is uncertain;
- It is obligatory for anyone who wakes up from sleep;
- It is obligatory only for the one who wakes from night-sleep, not day-sleep.
The cause of their divergence lies in how they understood the sound ḥadīth of Abū Hurayrah, in which the Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—said:
“If one of you wakes from his sleep, let him wash his hand before putting it into the vessel, for none of you knows where his hand spent the night.”
In another wording: “let him wash it three times.”
Those who saw no contradiction between this additional stipulation and the Qur’ānic verse on wuḍūʾ took the imperative here at its literal sense of obligation and counted the washing as a compulsory element of ablution. Among them, whoever understood the phrase “spent the night” to refer specifically to night-sleep confined the obligation to that; whoever took the phrase to mean sleep in general made it mandatory for every sleeper, day or night.
Conversely, anyone who perceived a conflict between this prophetic addition and the verse—whose apparent aim is to limit the obligatory acts of wuḍūʾ—resolved the tension by reading the command as one of recommendation rather than obligation. If the recommendation was strengthened in his view by the Prophet’s consistent practice, he classified it as a Sunnah; if not, he treated it as a meritorious, mustaḥabb act.
For this latter group, therefore, washing the hand in the state of certainty regarding its purity—according to their terminology—falls either under ‘Sunnah’ or under the broader category of ‘recommended.’