And ordinary experience makes it clear that the purifying water flowing over the bathhouse floor far, far exceeds the impurities in quantity. That water will therefore have purified whatever impurity it has passed over. People bathe in bathhouses without any ritual or physical impurity more often than they bathe to purify themselves from either. Most of the water they pour over their bodies is plain water that runs off unchanged. Even if it is slightly altered by a little lote leaf or saltwort, this does not deprive it of its purifying capacity.

Indeed, the stronger of the two views—one of the two positions reported from Ahmad, which he expressly affirmed in most of his responses—is that water altered by a pure substance, such as chickpeas or broad beans, remains pure and purifying so long as it can still be called water. This is like water whose characteristics are inherent in its original nature, such as seawater and the like, or water altered by things from which it is difficult to protect it, such as algae, tree leaves, and similar things. In linguistic usage, the term “water” encompasses these three categories equally.

Thus, if the word “water” in His saying,

“and find no water,”

includes one of these categories, it includes the other two as well. It has been established that it includes water altered from the outset and, by extension, water altered by things that are difficult to guard against; it therefore includes the third category. The distinction rests only on a familiar consideration: one kind of alteration can be avoided, whereas the other cannot. This distinction has no bearing on linguistic usage, on a word’s applicability to its meaning, or on a name’s inclusion of what it denotes. Anyone drawing such a distinction therefore needs separate evidence. And it has been established