Purity, Doubt, and the Mercy of Certainty
A comparative study of the Ḥanafī, Mālikī, Shāfiʿī, Ḥanbalī, Twelver Jaʿfarī, and Zaydī schools, with the contemporary Salafī/Atharī approach
بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ
Bismi llāhi r-Raḥmāni r-Raḥīm.
In the Name of Allah—the All-Merciful, the Ever-Merciful.
Some questions of fiqh are difficult because the evidence is difficult. Others become difficult because several different questions have been allowed to blur into one.
Praying the funeral prayer while wearing shoes is one of them. Recently after the funeral prayer of my mother-in-law, a dear friend and scholar raised the matter of the dangers of praying the funeral prayer while wearing shoes.
A janāzah is often prayed outdoors, as was the case of my mother-in-law's janāzah: in a cemetery, in an open courtyard, or where the rows extend beyond the masjid onto a road or pavement. We may have come directly from work, from traveling, or from accompanying the body. We look down at our shoes, and a thought occurs:
What if there is something impure underneath them?
I walked through streets.
I may have stepped somewhere wet.
Perhaps there was urine somewhere.
Perhaps an animal passed there.
Perhaps the sole touched something najis and I never noticed.
Should I remove my shoes?
More importantly, if I pray without removing them, is the prayer valid?
The first thing to say is the careful thing.
Shoes are not the problem.
Najāsah is the problem.
And even najāsah is not yet the whole problem.
We must distinguish between known impurity, suspected impurity, and impurity discovered only afterward. That distinction changes almost everything.
The Prophet ﷺ Prayed in His Shoes
We should begin where the evidence begins.
Anas ibn Mālik was asked:
أَكَانَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ ﷺ يُصَلِّي فِي النَّعْلَيْنِ؟ قَالَ: نَعَمْ.
A-kāna Rasūlu llāhi ﷺ yuṣallī fī al-naʿlayni? Qāla: naʿam.
“Did the Messenger of Allah ﷺ pray wearing sandals?” He replied: “Yes.”
Anas ibn Mālik; Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, no. 386; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, no. 555. Both reports are ṣaḥīḥ.
That should immediately remove one misunderstanding. Praying in footwear is not intrinsically disrespectful to ṣalāh. The Prophet ﷺ did it. The Companions knew it. The early jurists discussed it as an ordinary legal possibility.
Our present custom of removing footwear before entering a carpeted masjid is entirely sensible, but custom should not quietly transform itself into theology. A clean shoe is not religiously impure simply because it is a shoe.
Then there is a second ḥadīth, even more important for the question before us.
While the Prophet ﷺ was leading his Companions in prayer, he removed his sandals. Seeing him do so, the Companions removed theirs. After the prayer, he asked why they had done this. They explained that they had merely followed him.
The Prophet ﷺ then explained:
إِنَّ جِبْرِيلَ أَتَانِي فَأَخْبَرَنِي أَنَّ فِيهِمَا قَذَرًا.
Inna Jibrīla atānī fa-akhbaranī anna fīhimā qadharan.
“Jibrīl came to me and informed me that there was filth on them.”
Abū Saʿīd al-Khudrī; Sunan Abī Dāwūd, no. 650; graded ṣaḥīḥ by al-Albānī.
He then instructed people to inspect their sandals and, where filth was found, to wipe it away and pray in them.
This is an extraordinary little incident for the jurist. The Prophet ﷺ did not begin by assuming that his sandals must be contaminated because he had walked outdoors. He prayed in them. Only when he received actual knowledge of filth did he remove them. After removing them, he continued the prayer.
That sequence matters.
Three Questions, Not One
Can one pray the janāzah wearing shoes?
Yes, in principle.
Can one pray while knowingly carrying legally significant najāsah on those shoes?
Normally no, according to the Sunni and Zaydī schools, although Twelver Jaʿfarī funeral prayer has a different legal structure, to which we shall come.
What if one merely worries that the shoes might be impure?
This is the question that matters most in practice. Here Islamic law gives us something very important:
Possibility is not proof.
Certainty Has Legal Weight
One of the great maxims of fiqh states:
الْيَقِينُ لَا يَزُولُ بِالشَّكِّ.
Al-yaqīnu lā yazūlu bi-l-shakk.
Certainty is not removed by doubt.
This is not merely a memorable sentence for law students. It protects ordinary religious life.
If everything we could merely imagine becoming impure were treated as impure, life would become almost impossible. The pavement may have had urine on it. The bathroom floor may have been contaminated earlier. Someone may have walked through something impure and then across the floor. A dog may have passed along a road. Water splashed from somewhere whose history we do not know. Mud may contain something we cannot see.
The possibilities are endless. Fiqh refuses to build obligations upon endless possibilities.
Ḥanafī texts state the principle plainly: the original state of clothing is purity, and impurity is not established merely through doubt. One Ḥanafī presentation similarly says that if a person doubts the impurity of water or clothing, the doubt is not legally considered.
Twelver Jaʿfarī law states the same principle with striking clarity: something whose impurity is merely doubted remains pure, and one is not even required to investigate it. But if one previously knew it to be impure and now doubts whether it became pure, the prior state of impurity remains legally operative.
That last distinction is crucial.
“Perhaps my shoe became impure” is one case.
“I know my shoe became impure, but perhaps it became clean afterward” is another.
In the first case, your certainty was purity. In the second, your certainty was impurity. The same principle operates in both cases: certainty is not displaced by doubt.
How the Schools Structure the Question
A Shared Sunni Starting Point
Before looking at each madhhab separately, one structural point should be made. The four Sunni schools ordinarily treat ṣalāt al-janāzah as ṣalāh for purposes of the familiar prerequisites: ritual purity, covering, qiblah, and freedom from non-excused physical impurity. Classical Sunni treatments therefore discuss the purity of body, clothing, and place in relation to the funeral prayer much as they do other prayers.
Agreement about the importance of purity, however, does not mean agreement about what happens when impurity was unknown. This is where the schools become particularly instructive.
The Ḥanafī School: Purity Is Required, but Suspicion Is Not Purity’s Opposite
The Ḥanafī school is relatively strict once actual, non-excused najāsah has been established. A standard Ḥanafī presentation states that ignorance and forgetfulness do not in themselves remove the requirement: if someone prayed in a garment containing non-excused impurity without knowing it, the prayer must be repeated once the fact is established.
This follows a coherent legal logic. Purity from najāsah is treated as a condition attaching to the prayer itself. If that condition was objectively absent, ignorance does not manufacture the missing condition.
There is strength in this reasoning. Law must sometimes distinguish between culpability and validity. A person may be entirely innocent of sin and yet have performed an act whose legal condition was absent.
It would be a mistake, however, to take this strictness and apply it to mere suspicion. The same Ḥanafī tradition explicitly refuses to establish najāsah through doubt. The person who says, “I walked through the street. Who knows what was there?” has not established impurity. His shoes remain legally pure.
Ḥanafī law is also practical about footwear itself. Classical material recognizes that certain solid impurities adhering to a sandal or khuff can be removed by rubbing the footwear against the ground, depending on the nature and state of the impurity.
The Ḥanafī position should therefore not be caricatured as suspicious of footwear. Its structure is better described this way:
Do not invent impurity through doubt. But when significant impurity is actually established, take the condition of purity seriously.
References: Ḥanafī treatment of doubt concerning water or clothing; ignorance, forgetfulness, and repetition; Ibn Nujaym on purification of the khuff by rubbing.
The Mālikī School: Perhaps the Most Direct Answer to the Question
The Mālikī discussion is particularly beautiful because Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ addresses almost exactly the anxiety with which we began.
Discussing prayer in sandals and khuffs, he states that they may be treated as pure:
He explicitly continues by considering the fact that the person may have walked through roads where contamination was conceivable. That possibility does not change the legal ruling.
This is very close to our actual question. Not: “I examined the shoe and found urine.” But: “I have been walking through roads. Surely there is a possibility that something impure was somewhere.”
Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ effectively replies: Yes, there is a possibility. And the shoe remains pure.
That distinction deserves to be remembered.
The Mālikī school is also comparatively accommodating when actual impurity was present but the person was ignorant of it or had forgotten it. Classical Mālikī formulations vary in how they characterize the obligation to remove najāsah, but the well-known practical result gives ignorance, forgetfulness, and inability a more significant role than the stricter Shāfiʿī and Ḥanafī approaches. Some formulations call for repetition within the prayer time rather than treating the prayer as one that must invariably be repeated afterward.
The strength of the Mālikī approach is its realism. Purity matters. Knowledge matters too. Ordinary human beings are not required to live as forensic investigators of every surface upon which their feet have traveled.
References: Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, Ikmāl al-Muʿlim, vol. 2, p. 488; Ibn Qudāmah’s comparative report of the Mālikī position in al-Mughnī.
The Shāfiʿī School: The Strongest Objective-Condition Approach
The Shāfiʿī school takes a stricter position concerning actual impurity. If a worshiper performs ṣalāh with non-excused najāsah upon the body or clothing, and it is subsequently established that the impurity was present during the prayer, ignorance or forgetfulness ordinarily does not save the prayer.
The logic is clear. Freedom from najāsah is a condition of validity. A condition is not merely an instruction addressed to someone who knows about it; it is something the act itself requires.
This may appear severe, but it is not irrational. Suppose someone unknowingly prays without wuḍūʾ. We do not normally say that sincere ignorance creates wuḍūʾ. The Shāfiʿī jurist asks whether physical purity should similarly be treated as an objective condition. That is the strength of the position.
Again, however, Shāfiʿī law does not permit suspicion to masquerade as certainty.
A Shāfiʿī text gives a particularly useful example. If someone finishes prayer and then notices impurity, but it is reasonably possible that the impurity appeared only after the prayer, repetition is not required because the original presumption is that it was not present during the prayer.
Notice what has happened. Even within the strictest framework, certainty still matters. The school does not say: “You found impurity now, so imagine backward and invalidate everything.” It asks: Do we actually know that it was there during the prayer?
If not, the prayer is protected by the prior presumption. This is fiqh doing something very important: it refuses retrospective anxiety.
Reference: Yaḥyā ibn Abī al-Khayr al-ʿImrānī, al-Bayān fī Madhhab al-Imām al-Shāfiʿī, vol. 2, p. 108.
The Ḥanbalī School: Two Legal Paths Within One Madhhab
The Ḥanbalī tradition is especially interesting because both sides of the later Sunni disagreement are already present within the school.
If a person finishes the prayer and finds impurity but does not know whether it was present during the prayer, Ḥanbalī texts say that the prayer is valid because the original presumption is that the impurity was absent at the relevant time.
So again, doubt does not invalidate.
But what if we become certain that the impurity was indeed present during the prayer, although the worshiper did not know? Here Imam Aḥmad has two transmitted positions. One requires repetition because purity is a condition that ignorance does not remove. The other does not require repetition, using the Prophet’s ﷺ removal of his sandals during prayer as evidence.
This internal disagreement is important. It means that the later position associated with Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Bāz, Ibn ʿUthaymīn, and many Salafī jurists did not simply appear outside the madhhab. It has roots within the transmitted Ḥanbalī tradition.
One Ḥanbalī argument asks: If the Prophet’s ﷺ prayer had become invalid from its beginning because najāsah was unknowingly present on his sandals, why did he simply remove them and continue? Why did he not restart?
That is a powerful question.
Reference: Ibn Qudāmah, al-Mughnī, “One Who Prays and Then Sees Impurity on His Body or Clothing”.
Twelver Jaʿfarī Fiqh: The Question Changes Completely
Here we encounter something genuinely different. It would be misleading simply to describe the Twelver position as “more lenient.” Its legal architecture is different.
In contemporary Twelver Jaʿfarī law, represented clearly in the rulings of Sayyid ʿAlī al-Sīstānī, ṣalāt al-mayyit does not require ritual purity from hadath, purity from physical najāsah, or even all the normal clothing conditions required for the daily prayers. Observing the usual conditions of ṣalāh is preferable, but they are not all conditions of validity for the funeral prayer.
That means the question, “What if there was najāsah on my shoe?” has a very different answer in Twelver funeral law. Even if actual najāsah were present, this by itself would not invalidate ṣalāt al-mayyit under this formulation.
This should not be misunderstood. Twelver fiqh takes najāsah very seriously in ordinary ṣalāh. The same legal corpus expressly requires purity of body and clothing for the normal daily prayer.
The distinction concerns ṣalāt al-mayyit specifically. The funeral prayer has a distinctive juridical form. It does not contain the ordinary sequence of rukūʿ and sujūd, and the Imāmī juristic tradition does not simply transfer every condition of the canonical daily ṣalāh to it.
There is a second point directly relevant to anxiety about shoes. Twelver law is particularly explicit that doubtful impurity remains legally pure and that one need not investigate merely because uncertainty exists.
So even before reaching the special rules of funeral prayer, the anxiety has largely disappeared. Unknown contamination is not contamination established by law.
References: Sayyid ʿAlī al-Sīstānī, Islamic Laws, ruling 585 on ṣalāt al-mayyit; rulings 115–117 on establishing impurity and the presumption of purity.
Zaydī Fiqh: Much Closer to the Sunni Structure
The Zaydī tradition gives us a useful reminder that “Shīʿī fiqh” is not a single, undifferentiated legal system. On this question, Zaydī law stands much closer to the Sunni schools than to the Twelver position.
The classical Zaydī al-Jāmiʿ al-Kāfī contains an explicit section on prayer in sandals. It states that there is no problem praying in khuffs or sandals provided that they are pure. It also transmits approval of prayer in sandals from Ibn ʿAbbās, ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥusayn, and Abū Jaʿfar.
The same passage preserves a ruling attributed to Imam al-Hādī allowing prayer in footwear where no impurity or filth is known or seen.
This is again very close to our practical concern. Not knowing that a shoe is impure is legally significant. One does not begin from contamination. One begins from purity.
The same Zaydī source says that if filth becomes known during the prayer, the footwear is removed; the formulation represented there then calls for restarting the prayer.
Zaydī funeral law also retains the ordinary structure of ritual purification strongly enough that its texts discuss tayammum when performing wuḍūʾ would cause the janāzah prayer to be missed.
Twelver Jaʿfarī: The ordinary purity conditions are not conditions of validity for ṣalāt al-mayyit itself.
Zaydī: The funeral prayer remains much more closely integrated into the normal ṣalāh framework.
This is one of those places where saying simply “the Shīʿī view” obscures more than it clarifies.
References: al-Jāmiʿ al-Kāfī fī Fiqh al-Zaydiyyah, vol. 1, pp. 118–120 on sandals and impurity; vol. 1, pp. 299–300 on wuḍūʾ and tayammum for the funeral prayer.
The Salafī/Atharī Approach: Not a Fifth Madhhab
I am including the Salafī position separately because it is commonly asked about separately. Methodologically, however, it is better understood as a contemporary Atharī-Salafī jurisprudential approach rather than as a fifth classical Sunni madhhab.
Its importance here lies in the weight it gives to the apparent meaning of the sandal ḥadīth.
Shaykh Ibn Bāz repeatedly affirmed that praying in clean footwear is permissible and part of the Prophetic Sunnah where circumstances make it appropriate. He also stressed that modern carpeted mosques create a different practical consideration: one should not soil carpets or inconvenience worshipers merely to demonstrate a technically permissible Sunnah.
More importantly, Ibn Bāz held that if someone prayed with najāsah on clothing or footwear without knowing about it, or having forgotten it, the prayer is valid and need not be repeated.
Ibn ʿUthaymīn similarly distinguishes physical impurity from the absence of wuḍūʾ. A person who discovers after prayer that he had been without wuḍūʾ must repeat, but one who discovers previously unknown physical najāsah need not do so.
The central proof is the incident of the sandals. The argument is simple:
The Prophet ﷺ was praying.
Jibrīl informed him of filth.
He removed the sandals.
He continued praying.
He did not start again.
The Salafī reading therefore distinguishes between two types of condition. Wuḍūʾ is something one is positively commanded to acquire. Avoidance of najāsah is something one is commanded not to carry knowingly. When the latter occurs through ignorance or forgetfulness, the worshiper is excused.
Whether one accepts that uṣūl distinction in full or not, the ḥadīth evidence behind it is strong.
References: Ibn Bāz, “The Ruling on Praying in Shoes and Khuffs” and “The Ruling on One Who Prayed with Impurity Without Knowing”; Ibn ʿUthaymīn, fatwa distinguishing hadath from unknown najāsah.
Which Opinion Has the Strongest Evidence?
Several different questions require several different answers.
On whether prayer in shoes is intrinsically permissible
The evidence is overwhelming. The Prophet ﷺ prayed in sandals. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim report it directly. This is not really an area in which we need to manufacture a controversy.
The question is cleanliness, not footwear.
On mere doubt about the purity of shoes
Here too, I think the evidence and legal reasoning are very strong.
Mere doubt should be ignored.
Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ’s discussion is particularly persuasive because he explicitly considers the possibility that shoes have traveled through roads where something impure might have been encountered, yet refuses to declare them impure without certainty.
The Ḥanafī treatment states the same principle. The Twelver treatment states it even more explicitly. The Shāfiʿī and Ḥanbalī discussions likewise preserve a prayer where it is uncertain whether a subsequently discovered impurity was actually present during it.
So on the question with which we began—“I am worried my shoes might be impure, although I have no actual knowledge of impurity”—I do not think we should create a false dispute.
On actual impurity that was unknowingly present
Here there is genuine disagreement.
The stricter Ḥanafī, Shāfiʿī, and one Ḥanbalī approach has a strong juridical argument: a condition of validity exists objectively. Ignorance excuses sin, but need not create validity. That is coherent.
On balance, however, I find the Sunni position that does not require repetition—represented by the Mālikī leniency, one narration from Aḥmad, Ibn Taymiyyah, and later Salafī jurists—to possess the stronger direct textual evidence.
Why?
Because the sandal incident is not hypothetical. Something objectionable was on the Prophet’s ﷺ footwear. He learned about it during the prayer. He removed the footwear. He did not restart.
The strict jurist can answer that perhaps the impurity reached the sandal only after the prayer began, or can interpret the report through other possibilities. That is a legitimate uṣūl response. But it is not the most natural reading of the incident.
The apparent lesson of the report is simpler:
Remove known impurity when it becomes known; do not retrospectively invalidate what was done in ignorance.
I find that reading persuasive—not because it is easier, but because it follows the sequence of the Prophetic action more directly.
Five Practical Situations
Our original case is easier than the full juristic disagreement. Most people asking this question do not actually have impure shoes. They have uncertain shoes. That is a different category.
I walked through ordinary streets, and my shoes look clean.
Pray. There is nothing to investigate. You are not required to reconstruct the microbial, animal, and human history of the pavement.
There is ordinary mud on the sole, but I have no evidence that it contains najāsah.
The mud is not transformed into najāsah because you are imaginative. Pray. Dirt and najāsah are not synonyms. Something may be dusty, muddy, unpleasant-looking, or in need of cleaning while remaining legally pure.
I definitely stepped in urine and do not know whether the shoe was subsequently purified.
Now the situation changes. Your last established state is impurity. You cannot use “certainty is not removed by doubt” only when it gives the result you prefer. The same rule now works against you.
Clean the footwear or remove it before praying under the Sunni and Zaydī frameworks. In Twelver law, this known impurity still does not, by itself, invalidate ṣalāt al-mayyit specifically, although purification remains the better and more reverent practice.
I discover actual filth while already praying.
The Prophetic report strongly supports removing the affected footwear and continuing the prayer. Some madhhab formulations are stricter about whether continuation is sufficient, as we have seen particularly in the Zaydī text and in one strand of Sunni jurisprudence.
But nobody should respond by remaining knowingly in impurity when it can easily be removed. Knowledge changes responsibility.
The janāzah is inside a carpeted masjid.
Take the shoes off—not because shoes are inherently unfit for prayer, but because the carpet is a shared trust. The same Sunnah that permits prayer in footwear does not require us to drag street dirt onto a clean prayer carpet in order to prove that we know the ḥadīth.
Fiqh without adab easily becomes performance. The Prophet ﷺ permitted prayer in shoes. He also taught us not to harm others. There is no contradiction.
When Waswasah Wears the Clothes of Taqwā
Sometimes excessive suspicion presents itself as religious caution.
“I only want to be safe.”
That sounds admirable. Sometimes it is. But not every additional burden is waraʿ.
Sometimes the Sharīʿah has already declared something pure, and we continue insisting that perhaps it is impure. At that point, we are not being more cautious than the law. We are refusing its caution.
The law is cautious about impurity. But it is also cautious about suspicion. It guards purity, and it guards certainty. It commands us to wash what is actually impure, and it prevents us from turning the whole world into something potentially contaminated.
Both are part of the balance.
This is why the legal maxim matters so much:
الْيَقِينُ لَا يَزُولُ بِالشَّكِّ.
Al-yaqīnu lā yazūlu bi-l-shakk.
Certainty is not removed by doubt.
There is mercy in that sentence—not the mercy of ignoring cleanliness, but the mercy of knowing when cleanliness has actually become an obligation.
The Janāzah Is Not the Place for Unnecessary Anxiety
There is something else that should not be lost in all this law.
A janāzah is a moment of extraordinary human truth. Someone who yesterday wore shoes, made plans, answered messages, worried about money, became annoyed, laughed with family, postponed things, and expected another morning is now lying before us.
The rows form. The takbīrs begin. We stand between the world the deceased has left and the world toward which all of us are traveling.
At such a moment, fiqh should help us worship Allah properly. It should not make us stare anxiously at our soles while forgetting the soul for whom we came to pray.
If you know there is impurity, remove it. If you see impurity, clean it. If your shoes are clean, pray. If you merely imagine that somewhere, sometime, something may possibly have touched them, leave the imagination where it belongs.
The Sharīʿah did not ask you to know what you cannot know. It asked you to act upon what is established.
Perhaps that is one of the deeper lessons hidden in this small question. We often imagine taqwā as the multiplication of precautions. But taqwā is not simply doing more. Taqwā is submitting to the limits Allah has placed upon both obligation and doubt.
There are times when piety says: Wash it.
And there are times when piety says: Stop investigating.
Both require obedience.
My Practical Conclusion
If I were attending a janāzah outdoors—in a cemetery, on open ground, or on a paved area—and I was wearing ordinary shoes whose soles showed no known najāsah, I would pray in them without hesitation.
I would not remove them merely because:
- I had walked through streets.
- I did not know everything I had stepped upon.
- There had been rain.
- The ground was muddy.
- An animal might have passed there.
- A public toilet had been somewhere earlier in my journey.
- Some unknown contamination was theoretically possible.
These possibilities do not establish najāsah.
If I saw actual filth, I would remove or clean the footwear. If I knew that the shoe had previously become najis and had no reason to believe that it had subsequently been purified, I would treat that as a different case.
If someone later told me that there had unknowingly been some impurity on my shoe, I would recognize the genuine madhhab disagreement concerning retrospective validity. If following the stricter Ḥanafī or Shāfiʿī position, I would respect its objective-condition reasoning. If following the Mālikī, second Ḥanbalī, or Salafī position, I would regard the prayer as valid; in my assessment, that latter conclusion has the stronger direct support from the Prophetic sandal incident.
For a Twelver Jaʿfarī Muslim, the issue is simpler still with respect to ṣalāt al-mayyit itself because physical purity of the worshiper’s clothing is not a condition of validity for that prayer, although maintaining purity remains preferable.
For a Zaydī Muslim, the structure is closer to Sunni jurisprudence: footwear is perfectly acceptable where pure, and known impurity must be taken seriously.
But for all of us, one principle should remain clear:
Do not confuse what might be impure with what has become impure in law.
That distinction may seem small. It protects an enormous amount of religious life.
A Final Reflection
There is a beautiful balance in the ḥadīth of the sandals.
The Prophet ﷺ did not begin the prayer suspicious of his shoes. When knowledge came, he acted immediately. He neither ignored actual impurity nor imagined impurity before it was known.
Perhaps this is precisely the balance we need.
Before knowledge: peace.
After knowledge: action.
No negligence.
No obsession.
No indifference to purity.
No servitude to doubt.
Perhaps that is why the juristic principle reaches beyond shoes and beyond ṣalāh. A believer should not build judgments upon suspicion when Allah has given him certainty—not about things, not about people, not even about himself.
Sometimes faith asks us to become more careful. Sometimes faith asks us to stop doubting what Allah has already permitted us to trust.
اللَّهُمَّ فَقِّهْنَا فِي الدِّينِ، وَعَلِّمْنَا مَا يَنْفَعُنَا، وَارْزُقْنَا طَهَارَةَ الظَّاهِرِ وَالْبَاطِنِ، وَلَا تَجْعَلِ الشَّكَّ سَبِيلًا إِلَى الْوَسْوَاسِ، وَلَا التَّيْسِيرَ سَبِيلًا إِلَى التَّهَاوُنِ. آمِينَ.
Allāhumma faqqihnā fī al-dīn, wa-ʿallimnā mā yanfaʿunā, wa-rzuqnā ṭahārata al-ẓāhiri wa-l-bāṭin, wa-lā tajʿali al-shakka sabīlan ilā al-waswās, wa-lā al-taysīra sabīlan ilā al-tahāwun. Āmīn.
O Allah, grant us understanding of the religion, teach us what benefits us, grant us purity outwardly and inwardly, do not allow doubt to become a road to obsessive misgiving, and do not allow ease to become a road to carelessness. Āmīn.
Source Note
The principal Prophetic evidence is the report of Anas ibn Mālik concerning the Prophet ﷺ praying in sandals, preserved in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, no. 386, and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, no. 555, together with the report of Abū Saʿīd al-Khudrī concerning Jibrīl informing the Prophet ﷺ of filth upon his sandals during prayer, preserved in Sunan Abī Dāwūd, no. 650.
For the Sunni madhhabs, the discussion above draws on classical and madhhab-specific treatments of the purity conditions of prayer and ṣalāt al-janāzah: Ḥanafī material concerning doubt, impurity, and footwear; Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ’s unusually direct Mālikī discussion of sandals that may have traveled through roads; Shāfiʿī treatments of previously unknown impurity; and Ḥanbalī texts preserving both narrations from Imam Aḥmad.
For Twelver Jaʿfarī law, I have used the published rulings of Sayyid ʿAlī al-Sīstānī concerning ṣalāt al-mayyit and the presumption of purity.
For Zaydī law, the central source is al-Jāmiʿ al-Kāfī fī Fiqh al-Zaydiyyah, particularly its explicit section on praying in sandals, supplemented by its treatment of purification for funeral prayer.
For the contemporary Salafī/Atharī position, I have primarily used the published rulings of Shaykh ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Bāz and the corresponding explanation of Shaykh Muḥammad ibn Ṣāliḥ al-ʿUthaymīn concerning unknown najāsah.
