Why We Start With Water
We began the year not with prayer, but with water.
The book is Matn al-Ghāyah wa al-Taqrīb — “The Goal and the Path” — better known simply as Matn Abī Shujāʿ. Its author was a judge, Qāḍī Abū Shujāʿ Aḥmad b. al-Ḥusayn al-Aṣfahānī, from Isfahan in what is now Iran. He is buried in Madīnah, and by some accounts lived to 160. His friends asked him for something small: the fiqh of the Shāfiʿī school, clearly categorised and numbered, easy enough for a beginner to memorise. He gave them about twenty pages. Those twenty pages have been taught from Cairo to Java, from West Africa to Ḥaḍramawt, for a thousand years.
In the Name of Allah, Most Kind,
The Merciful to heart and mind.
All praise to Him, the Lord of all,
Who answers every humble call.
Peace and blessings without end
On our Master Muḥammad — mercy and light —
Whose guidance turns our darkness bright.
And to his family and companions dear,
And all who hold his guidance near.
A thousand years, or nearly so,
A judge in old Isfahan, you know,
Named Aḥmad — Abū Shujāʿ by fame —
Took up his pen in Allah’s name.
His friends had asked him: “Write us small,
A book a child could learn in all,
That gathers Shāfiʿī’s wise way
On how to fast, to give, to pray.”
He wrote al-Ghāyah wa-l-Taqrīb —
“The Goal and Path” — short, sharp, and deep.
From Cairo’s domes to Java’s shore,
From West Africa’s far door,
From Mecca’s hills to Hadhramaut,
This little book was learned by rote —
Teaching young and teaching old
How to live as Muslims should:
In ṣalāh, in zakāh’s care,
In fasting and the Hajj’s prayer.
And now we try, in English rhyme,
To pass this gift through space and time —
Our turn to hold what others bore,
A thousand years, and now one more.
O Allah, accept this humble try,
Forgive its faults — and hear our cry:
Join us with those who walked before:
The seekers at Your sacred door.
Where fiqh sits
Everything in Islamic studies goes back to Ḥadīth Jibrīl: islām, īmān, iḥsān.
Islām is what a Muslim must do — the five pillars. Īmān is what a Muslim must believe — the six articles. Iḥsān is what a Muslim must feel: that you worship Allah as though you see Him, and if you cannot see Him, you know that He sees you.
Islām is the body. Īmān begins in the mind and moves to the heart. Iḥsān is heart and soul. Or: īmān is why, islām is what, iḥsān is how you perfect it.
Each dimension became a science. The first became fiqh.
Why we learn through a madhhab
Someone always asks: why not just learn the fiqh of the Prophet ﷺ directly?
That is exactly what we’re doing. Imām al-Shāfiʿī learned from the Tābiʿīn, who learned from the Ṣaḥābah, who learned from the Prophet. He did not invent a new wuḍūʾ. What he provided was structure.
Consider the alternative. How many verses of the Qurʾān discuss wuḍūʾ? Essentially one — Sūrat al-Māʾidah, verse 6. And it tells you to wash your face and arms, wipe your head, wash your feet. It does not tell you what breaks your wuḍūʾ. For that you go to the hadith — of which there are somewhere over fifty thousand. Without a madhhab, you would need to sift all 6,236 verses, then all fifty thousand narrations, then sort every result into obligatory and recommended, yourself, before your next prayer.
A madhhab is a peer-reviewed system for practising the religion. One scholar establishes it; others do independent research and arrive at the same conclusion; they write commentaries, notes, corrections, summaries. It has been running for twelve hundred years. It is not the work of one man.
You can see the review process in the physical shape of the books. A matn — twenty pages, meant for memorising, no verses or hadith in it, just rulings. Then a sharḥ, a commentary, which explains and supplies the evidence: twenty pages becomes two hundred. Then students’ marginal notes are collected into a ḥāshiyah: two hundred becomes two thousand. Then someone says this is too long, and summarises it back down to fifty — and the cycle begins again.
So why water first?
Almost every fiqh book opens with purification, and the reason is simple: the most important act of worship is ṣalāh, and purification is its key. Bad wuḍūʾ, bad prayer. And wuḍūʾ needs water. So we are preparing to pray — by learning about water.
The waters fit to purify
are seven kinds — now learn them by:
the rain that falls from clouds above,
the rolling sea we’ve come to love,
the river’s flow, the well’s deep store,
the bubbling spring from earth’s own floor,
the melted snow that mountains keep,
the hail that falls from heaven’s deep.
Seven — and one way to hold them all: every one of them either falls from the sky or comes out of the ground. Naturally occurring water. Sea water counts. Well water counts. If you are stranded in the Australian Alps, melted snow counts.
Four kinds of water
Muṭlaq — pure, purifying, not disliked. The seven waters, as they naturally are.
Mushammas — sun-heated. Still valid, but disliked:
When sun has warmed it in a pot
of metal, in a region hot,
and used upon the skin, not cloth,
then caution stays the prudent’s path.
A plastic jug? No harm at all —
only metal makes this call.
Note the conditions stacking up: metal, sun, hot climate, on the skin. A plastic bucket in a Perth winter is not mushammas. A metal drum left out in a 43-degree week is. Move it into the shade for half an hour and, on one view, the dislike lifts with the heat.
Mustaʿmal — used, or altered. Water that has already lifted a ḥadath has done its work; it cannot do it twice. You may drink it or water your plants with it. And water mixed with something pure that changes its taste, smell or colour has also left the muṭlaq category: coffee, soap suds, salt water for a mouth ulcer, sugar in a glass. All fine to drink. None of them will do for wuḍūʾ.
Which raises the sea again. Isn’t sea water salty? Yes — but that is how it naturally is, and that is the whole test. Sea water is muṭlaq. Sea water with coffee stirred into it is not.
Mutanajjis — impure:
Fourth — mutanajjis, the impure:
When najāsah mixes in, for sure
The water’s blocked from every use —
No wudūʾ, ghusl, no drink, no wash.
Unless its volume’s truly vast —
Two qullahs is the measure passed.
About two hundred litres’ store
Means small najāsah taints no more —
Unless its colour, smell, or taste
Has shifted; then the rule’s replaced.
Remove the cause, restore the rest,
And the water passes again the test.
Two qullahs is five hundred ritl Baghdādī in the classical books — roughly two hundred litres today, though you’ll see 180 and 190 depending on which conversion the author took.
Below that threshold, a single drop of impurity ruins the water. Above it, impurity only ruins it if the taste, smell or colour actually changes. This is why we drink from rivers and make wuḍūʾ from a sea that fish live their whole lives in. Volume.
And in those bays where dolphins are herded and killed until the water runs red — that water is mutanajjis, because the properties have changed. Then the tide comes in, the cause is removed, and the water passes the test again.
That was the whole first lesson: what water is.
