and has neither been alone with her nor had intercourse with her—there is a well-known disagreement among scholars within Ahmad’s school and elsewhere over whether this makes the dower definitively due.

Whoever claims that His words, “Or you have touched women,” encompass touching even without desire has departed from the language in which the Quran was revealed, and indeed from people’s customary usage. When touching is mentioned in connection with a man and a woman, it is understood to mean touching with desire. Likewise, when the term for intercourse—which can also mean treading—is used in connection with a man and a woman, it is understood to mean intercourse with the sexual organ, not treading with the foot.

Moreover, the proponent of this view does not say that the ruling applies to touching women without qualification. Rather, he restricts it to a particular category of women: those presumed to arouse desire. Touching someone not presumed to arouse desire—such as an unmarriageable female relative or a young girl—does not, according to him, invalidate ablution. He has thus abandoned the apparent meaning to which he claimed to adhere and introduced a condition with no basis in either a text or analogy. The principles expressly laid down in the texts distinguish between touching with desire and touching without desire; they do not distinguish according to whether the person touched is presumed to arouse desire. It is touching with desire that has legal consequences in all acts of worship, such as the consecrated state for pilgrimage, devotional retreat, fasting, and others.

Since this view is supported by neither the apparent meaning of the wording nor analogy, it has no basis in Islamic law. As for those who make the invalidation of ablution dependent on desire, the familiar, apparent meaning of such language provides evidence