Three shafi'ites in search of water: The indulgence of Tayammum and its rigorous preconditions

The great turn-of-the-century Hungarian orientalist, Ignaz Goldziher, found two related aspects of the religion he spent his life studying especially disagreeable: (1) "the soul-destroying pedantry of the jurists of Islam" whose "quibbling discriminations" and "dreary exegetical trifling" proved "detrimental to the inwardness of religion"; and (2) the inclination among those same "perverters of the law" to "think up contingencies that will never arise" and entertain "far-fetched legal cases, casuistic constructs quite independent of the real world" as they indulge in "the boldest and most reckless flights of fantasy." Goldziher objected, in short, to what he saw as the dual plague of hair-splitting and theoretical sophistry afflicting the classical works of Islamic jurisprudence.