the lawful and the unlawful on the basis of something that most people cannot determine most of the time? In more than one hadith, he stated without qualification:

“Water is purifying; nothing renders it impure,”

and:

“Water does not acquire major ritual impurity.”

He specified no quantity, even though clarification may not be delayed beyond the time when it is needed. The explicit wording of this hadith agrees with those reports. Its implied meaning is authoritative—even according to those who accept such implications—only when there is no reason for singling something out for mention without restricting the ruling to it. The absence of such a reason has not been established here.

As for the hadith commanding that a vessel’s contents be poured away after a dog has lapped from it, this is because the vessels from which dogs ordinarily lap are small. A dog’s saliva is viscous: it remains in the water and clings to the vessel. The water is therefore poured away, and the vessel is washed to remove the saliva, which has not yet been transformed into another substance. This differs from a dog lapping from a large vessel. Harb reported from Ahmad, concerning a dog that had lapped from a large receptacle containing oil, that he instructed the owner to eat it. A detailed discussion of these questions belongs elsewhere. The purpose here is simply to draw attention to what contradicts analogical reasoning and what accords with it.

Section

The claim that purifying water is contrary to analogical reasoning rests on this unsound principle. Otherwise, for someone whose foundational principle is that analogical reasoning entails that water does not