Those who deemed that water enjoys a further, special distinction refused to allow any substitute except in the single area where the concession is expressly given, namely the two exits. When the Ḥanafīs pressed the Shāfiʿīs to identify this alleged added privilege of water, the latter took refuge in the claim that the ruling is a pure act of worship; they could offer no intelligible reason. Indeed, they conceded that water does not remove impurity through any perceptible, rational property, but only by a legal, prescriptive effect.
The argument dragged on: is the removal of impurity with water an act of devotion or a rule grounded in a graspable rationale? Later scholars inherited the dispute from their predecessors. Under pressure, the Shāfiʿīs were forced to assert that water possesses a legal power to lift the rulings of impurity that no other substance shares, even though every material is equally able to remove the physical filth. They maintained that the real objective is to erase that legal ruling, which is peculiar to water, by eliminating the visible filth—so much so that the stain might vanish while the ruling still remains. In doing so, they distanced themselves from the purpose. Yet they had earlier agreed with the Ḥanafīs that purifying filth is not ritual purification in the technical legal sense, and therefore requires no intention.
Had they instead said, “We hold that water has a unique power to dissolve and remove dirt and defilement from clothes and bodies, a power nothing else possesses, and for that reason people rely on it for cleansing,” they would have offered a sound position—indeed, perhaps one that must be affirmed. For the Law appears to have required washing impurities with water precisely because of this property. Had they adopted that explanation, they would have spoken in a manner more in keeping with jurisprudence that proceeds on discernible meanings. A jurist only falls back on the statement “It is an act of worship” when every other avenue of argument against his opponent has closed. Reflect on this, for their writings reveal it in many places.
As for their divergence regarding dung, it arises from different understandings of the Prophet’s—peace and blessings be upon him—prohibition, namely his instruction, “Do not perform istinjāʾ with bone or with dung.” Those who understood the prohibition to render the act invalid ruled it impermissible. Those who did not—because impurity, to them, is a rationally intelligible matter—treated the prohibition as merely reprehensible and did not consider istinjāʾ with such items invalid. Those who distinguished between bone and dung did so because, in their view, dung itself is impure.
Chapter Five
The manner in which impurities are removed
Regarding the method by which impurity is eliminated, the scholars concur that three means are attested by the Law and established in the transmitted reports: washing, wiping, and sprinkling.
They agree, moreover, that washing applies to every kind of impurity and to every place where impurity may occur; that wiping with stones is permissible for the two exits, for leather socks, for sandals soiled by dry grass, and likewise for a woman’s long hem; and they hold in common that its purification follows the plain sense of the ḥadīth