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Prayers/Salaat

What Nullifies Wudu?

Anything exiting the two passages, deep sleep, loss of consciousness, and — on the view of some schools — touching the private parts directly and eating camel meat.

SU Maryam Suleiman 3 min read

Answers are more useful when you can see the working, so the evidence is set out below.

The evidence

The Prophet ﷺ was asked about a man who imagines something during prayer and said he should not leave unless he hears a sound or finds an odour (Sahih al-Bukhari 137) — establishing that certainty is not lifted by doubt.

Light drowsiness while seated does not break wudu; deep sleep in which awareness is lost does.

Camel meat is established as nullifying wudu in a sahih narration (Sahih Muslim 360), a position held by the Hanbalis and by many contemporary scholars.

In practice

  • Never repeat wudu on the basis of doubt alone; the hadith addresses this directly.
  • Bleeding and vomiting are disputed between schools — follow your school or a scholar consistently.
  • Waswasah about purity is common; the treatment is to act on the default and ignore the doubt.

None of this is complicated. The difficulty is entirely in the doing, and the doing starts with one repetition today.

Go deeper. Thousands of answers, searchable by topic and reviewed before publication, are at Islamic Q&A — qa.hisnulmuslimapp.com.

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