—three days together with their nights, that is, seventy-two hours. If a person begins wiping while resident and then travels before the period has elapsed, he completes the traveller’s allowance: three full days of wiping.
By way of illustration: suppose he put the socks on for the dawn (fajr) prayer today, wiped over them at the noon (ẓuhr) prayer, and then set out on a journey after ẓuhr. He may continue wiping for the full three-day period.
If the opposite occurs—he wipes while travelling and then becomes a resident—he must finish on the resident’s timetable, because the decisive factor is the state at the end, not at the beginning. In matters of travel or residence, the ruling is governed by how one ends, not how one starts.
This is the position to which Imām Aḥmad, may Allah have mercy on him, ultimately returned. At first he maintained that if a person wiped as a resident and then travelled, he should still complete the resident’s limit; later, however, he retracted that view in light of another narration and held that such a person completes the traveller’s limit.
Do not find it strange that a scholar withdraws a previous opinion, for the truth is what must be followed. Whenever the truth becomes evident, one is obliged to embrace it. It is reported that Imām Aḥmad sometimes has more than four—indeed, five to seven—different statements on a single question, even though he was only one man. At times he explicitly declares a retraction; at other times he does not. When he states it plainly, it is impermissible to attribute to him the abandoned view except with qualification, saying, “He first held such-and-such, then retracted.” If he does not expressly retract, all the reported views remain attributable to him, so one may say, “He has two statements,” or “three,” or “four.”
The abundance of variant reports from Imām Aḥmad is because he was a traditionalist (atharī) who built his rulings on transmitted reports. Such reports do not reach a scholar all at once, allowing him to survey them comprehensively and fix a single, final opinion; rather, they continue to come to him—someone brings him a hadith