under a covenant of protection are prevented from establishing new places of worship, but not from retaining existing ones if their covenant provides for this.

If it is the initial construction that is disliked, then a person in a state of major ritual impurity, or someone in a similar position, is obliged to use a bathhouse only when this is possible. This establishes that entering a bathhouse is obligatory when one exists and is needed for obligatory purification. Why, then, do you say that building one for this purpose is permissible despite its involving something prohibited? Whatever is indispensable to fulfilling an obligation is itself obligatory; but whatever is necessary for an obligation to become binding is not itself obligatory. Here, the obligation does not arise when no bathhouse has been built. If you withhold judgment on whether building it is obligatory, then withhold judgment on whether it is permissible . . . (1).

The Fourth Category

Bathhouses that involve something prohibited but can be dispensed with, such as those in the Hijāz, Iraq, and Yemen in later times. This is the situation to which Ahmad’s explicit statement and Ibn ‘Umar’s avoidance apply.

Chapter Two: Entering Bathhouses

We say: No one may argue that entering bathhouses is disliked, or that it is not recommended, on the grounds that the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, never entered them, nor did Abū Bakr or ‘Umar, for