Concerning His words:

“Then wipe your faces and your hands with it,”

all seven canonical reciters agree on reading aydīkum (“your hands”) with the yā unvowelled. This differs from His words concerning ablution, “and your feet,” which some of the seven read as arjulakum, in the accusative. They explain that it is coordinated with the parts to be washed, the implied wording being: “Wash your faces and your hands, and your feet up to the ankles.” This was also stated by ‘Alī ibn Abī Tālib and others among the early generations.

Abū ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Sulamī said:

“Al-Hasan and al-Husayn recited to me, ‘And your feet up to the ankles,’ reading arjulikum in the genitive. ‘Alī ibn Abī Tālib heard this while adjudicating disputes between people. He said, ‘Wa-arjulakum’—meaning in the accusative—and said, ‘This is an instance of words being placed earlier or later than their underlying syntactic order.’”

Likewise, Ibn ‘Abbās read it in the accusative and said, “The command has returned to washing.”

This cannot be coordination according to syntactic position, as some suppose, as in the poet’s words:

Mu‘āwiyah, we are only human, so be gentle;
We are neither mountains nor iron.

Such a construction is permissible only with a particle of emphasis, akin to structural elements. It is not permissible, however, with particles that convey meaning. Here, the preposition bā denotes contact, not emphasis. This is why the reciters did not read wa-aydiyakum (“and your hands”) here as they read wa-arjulakum (“and your feet”) there.

For had He said, “Wipe your faces and your hands,” or “Wipe with them,” mere wiping would have sufficed, without conveying the purifying substance to the head. That, however, contradicts the consensus. Since the bā denotes contact, it indicates that the substance used for wiping must actually make contact. This in turn indicates