and this is the view of a number of earlier and later scholars, including Ibn Mas‘ūd, Ibn ‘Abbās, al-Zuhrī, Abū Thawr, and others.

This was Abū Thawr’s position, as transmitted from him by al-Marwadhī. When it was related to Ahmad, he said: “Abū Thawr likened it to water.” Al-Khallāl recorded this in his al-Jāmi‘, on the authority of al-Marwadhī. Likewise, the followers of Abū Hanīfah stated that, in their view, liquids have the same ruling as water. Their position concerning liquids in this regard is well known: if the liquid extends over an area such that movement at one end does not cause movement at the other, it does not become impure, just as they hold concerning water. Abū Thawr, by contrast, applies the two-qullah threshold, like al-Shāfi‘ī.

The position that liquids are like water is also mentioned as one view within Mālik’s school. His followers transmitted two reports from him concerning a small amount of impurity falling into a large quantity of food. It is also reported from Abū Nāfi‘, of the Mālikī school, concerning the large oil jars used in Syria, that a mouse dying in one does not render the oil impure. He said: “Oil is not like water.”

Ibn al-Mājishūn said that if a dead animal falls into oil or another liquid, without changing its properties, and the quantity is large, it does not become impure—unlike when the animal dies in it. He thus distinguished between its dying in the liquid and its falling into it after death.

The position of Ibn Hazm and other adherents of the literalist school is that liquids do not become impure when an impurity falls into them, except for clarified butter into which a mouse falls, just as they hold that water does not become impure unless someone urinates in it.

The third position distinguishes between an aqueous liquid, such as wine vinegar, and a non-aqueous liquid, such as grape vinegar: the former is treated like water, but not the latter.