and the rest of the scholars of Madinah likewise differed over how general the wiping of the head must be.
Some maintained that wiping only part of the head is not sufficient; this is the well-known view of Mālik.
Others allowed a partial wipe. Abū al-Faraj related from Muḥammad ibn Maslamah that he said: “It is not enough to wipe less than one-third of the head,” and Abū al-Faraj himself adopted that opinion.
[However, what Abū al-Faraj attributed to Muḥammad ibn Maslamah is, Allah knows best, a mistake. The view authentically reported from Muḥammad ibn Maslamah—and some transmit it from Mālik—is that if a person leaves un-wiped one-third of his head or less, his ablution is valid, but it is invalid if what remains unwiped is more than one-third.]
This, according to Ismāʿīl in al-Mabsūṭ, is Muḥammad ibn Maslamah’s position. For that reason we have said that Abū al-Faraj’s report is erroneous, whereas Ismāʿīl’s report agrees with Mālik’s foundational principle that the one-third threshold recurs in many of his writings and legal roots. Anything beyond one-third is, in Mālik’s school, frequently taken into account and never dismissed.
It would appear—Allah knows best—that hardly anyone can avoid missing a small portion of hair when wiping, even after due care, so he treated one-third or less as falling under that unavoidable margin, and therefore considered the ablution sound so long as two-thirds or more of the head has been wiped. This is the reasoning behind Muḥammad ibn Maslamah’s stance and his attribution of it to Mālik, and Allah knows best. Abū al-Faraj’s statement, too, could perhaps be reconciled with Mālik’s underlying “one-third rule”; Allah knows best. I have explained this in detail in my book al-Tamhīd, and in my view wiping the head is not intended to cover every single hair.
He then washes his feet together with the ankles, at which point he has fulfilled the obligatory elements of his purification. If someone forgets any of these acts and only remembers after he has performed the prayer, he must wash whatever he omitted and repeat the prayer.