How the Schools Count the Obligations

The farāʾiḍ of wuḍūʾ differ a little between the schools. According to the Ḥanafīs there are only four, and they are the ones spelled out plainly in the āyah. The face is washed once, from where the hair begins — the whole face, not merely the forehead, and only for someone who has hair there in the first place — and once only is farḍ. The right arm and the left arm are washed once each, including the elbows, with running water, so to speak; that too is farḍ. Masḥ is made once over a quarter of the head, wiping only once; that is farḍ. And both feet, including the ankles, are washed; that also is farḍ. Everything beyond this — washing each limb three times, beginning always from the right, and the rest of it — is sunnah, or adab, and there is no difficulty in any of it.

The Shāfiʿī school counts six farḍ components, or in a fuller reckoning seven. The first is the intention, which Imam al-Shāfiʿī holds to be farḍ in its own right; their foundational proof is the hadith innamā al-aʿmālu bi-l-niyyāt — actions are only by intentions — since no act of worship is accepted unless it is accompanied by a proper intention. Then come the four already named — the face, the two arms, and the wiping of the head — though even here their definition of the wiping differs from the Ḥanafī one. Where Allah (swt) says bi-ruʾūsikum, the letter bāʾ placed before ruʾūsikum is taken to denote a part rather than the whole, so that even the smallest touching may suffice; some, on this basis, do no more than touch the head at the roots of the hair, and this fulfils the requirement in the Shāfiʿī school. The feet make a fifth. The sixth is that the order, tartīb, must be followed: the feet cannot be washed, then the head wiped, then one arm and then the other, in whatever order comes first — it must proceed in sequence. A seventh, muwālāh, is that the acts follow one another without a break in between: the face cannot be washed, and the rest set aside for several minutes — to catch up, say, on the headlines of the stock market on the television — before the remaining arm is finally washed; wuḍūʾ must proceed in quick succession, without a gap. This account of the Shāfiʿī position is given here because a large number of Muslims follow Imam al-Shāfiʿī (may Allah have mercy on him), and whichever school a person follows is to be respected — its basics, at least, should be known.

The remaining detail will not be gone into here, but certain points deserve particular attention, because a great many people who learn about wuḍūʾ from books do not learn them properly, and once the habit of an incomplete wuḍūʾ takes hold it clings to a person as a habit until the day he dies. It is no surprise, then, if a person sometimes feels nothing at all in ṣalāh: the wuḍūʾ standing behind it was never properly done in the first place.