Wudu (Ablution)

Wudu is the ritual ablution a Muslim performs to reach a state of purity before prayer, before circling the Kaaba, and before handling the Quran. Its core is prescribed in the Quran (sura 5, verse 6): the washing of the face, the hands and forearms to the elbows, the wiping of the head, and the washing of the feet to the ankles, done in order and, in the developed law, beginning with an intention (niyya) and the name of God. Certain acts, sleep, using the toilet, breaking wind, nullify it and require it to be renewed; major impurity requires the full-body washing, ghusl, instead.

The jurists devoted whole sections of the law to it, because purity (tahara) is the gateway to valid worship and the schools differ on details such as whether the feet are washed or merely wiped. Where water is unavailable, a dry ablution with clean earth (tayammum) substitutes. Beneath the procedure lies a consistent idea: that approaching God in prayer is an act one prepares the body for, and that the preparation is itself part of the worship.

The Quranic basis for ablution before prayer is a single verse instructing believers to wash their faces and hands, wipe their heads, and wash their feet, along with a companion clause permitting dry ablution with clean earth when water cannot be found or used. Everything beyond that spare instruction, the order of the steps, how much of the arm counts as included, whether the ears are washed with the head or separately, what specifically breaks a completed wudu, was worked out over the following centuries by jurists building the classical legal schools, and the four surviving Sunni schools do not agree on every point.

Whether touching a woman invalidates ablution, whether bleeding does, and whether wiping over socks is permitted, and for how long, are live disagreements among the schools rather than settled Quranic rulings, and a Muslim traveling between regions can find the accepted practice varies. Tayammum, the dry substitute using earth or a clean surface, was itself controversial early on: some companions reportedly hesitated to use it at all, preferring to delay prayer until water was found, before the practice was accepted as fully sufficient rather than a lesser option. The five daily prayers require the ablution to be repeated whenever it has lapsed, which is why sequence and validity receive so much more juristic attention than the act's outward form.