He also said—may Allah have mercy on him:
Section: Bathhouses
Imam Ahmad disapproved of building, selling, buying, and renting bathhouses, because they often—or usually—involve prohibited practices, such as exposing, touching, and looking at private parts, and entering them when entry is prohibited, as in the prohibition concerning women. They may also involve acts of indecency, both major and minor, involving women and men.
The hadith narrated by al-Tabarānī states:
“Satan said, ‘My Lord, appoint a house for me.’ He replied, ‘Your house is the bathhouse.’”
Among the objectionable practices common in bathhouses is depicting animate beings on their walls. There is unanimous agreement on this.
I say:
I have written elsewhere that this must be restricted to cases where bathhouses are not needed. I therefore say here: either Ahmad’s responses and explicit statements were qualified in his own mind, in that he framed his remarks with reference to the bathhouses he knew in Iraq, the Hijaz, and Yemen—which comprise most of the lands he visited—for he did not travel