it is liquid, do not go near it,” this would only indicate that a small quantity into which an impurity has fallen becomes impure, as with the clarified butter asked about. It is well known that the questioner did not have more than two large jarfuls (qullahs) of clarified butter into which a mouse had fallen, such that one could invoke the maxim:

“Failure to seek further particulars about a reported situation, when different possibilities exist, gives the statement the force of a general ruling.”

Rather, the clarified butter that the people of Medina kept in their containers was generally small in quantity. Thus, even if the hadith were authentic, it would indicate only that a small quantity becomes impure. As for large quantities of liquids into which an impurity falls, neither an authentic nor a weak text, nor scholarly consensus, nor valid analogical reasoning establishes that they become impure.

Those who deem such liquids impure rely chiefly on the assumption that, when an impurity falls into water or another liquid, it spreads throughout it and renders all of it impure. The invalidity of this has already been established, as has the fact that no Muslim has applied it consistently, for doing so would entail declaring the sea impure. Rather, those who adopted this unsound principle made exceptions: some exempted a body of liquid in which movement at one end does not cause movement at the other; some, with respect to certain impurities, exempted quantities that cannot be drained away; and others exempted quantities exceeding two qullahs.

Some justified these exceptions by the hardship involved in declaring such quantities impure; others, by the impurity’s not reaching the entire large quantity; and others, by the impossibility of purification. These same reasons apply to large quantities of oils. An enormous storage jar may contain vast quantities of oil, which people cannot protect from things falling into it. Houses and shops are full of things that cannot be protected in this way, such as sugar and other goods. Declaring these impure would therefore entail very great difficulty and hardship.