The Eight Kinds of Purity

Tucked into the last pages of a short Urdu treatise on ghusl — after the fiqh, after the method, after the list of spots people leave dry — there is a passage that changes the subject entirely.

Peer Syed Khizar Hussain Chishti has spent twenty pages on washing the body. Then he quotes Shaykh Isma’il Haqqi, author of Tafsir Ruh al-Bayan, on the authority of Shaykh Nishapuri, and lists eight kinds of purity — of which the body is only the sixth.

It is a striking piece of teaching and, as far as we can find, it has not appeared in English before. So here it is.

The Eight

1. Purity of the heart

That it turn its face away from all besides Allah.

Everything else on the list depends on this one. A heart pointed at something else will keep the other seven going as performance.

2. Purity of the inward — taharat as-sirr

Al-mushahadah — witnessing.

The innermost part of a person, kept clear enough that awareness of Allah is not crowded out. This is the same idea the hadith of Jibril puts as ihsan: to worship Him as though you see Him.

3. Purity of the breast — taharat as-sadr

Ar-raja’ wal-qana’ah — putting an end to long-drawn hope, and adopting contentment.

Not the abandonment of hope in Allah, which is forbidden. The endless if only — the next job, the bigger house, the year when things will finally settle. A chest full of that has no room for anything else.

4. Purity of the soul — taharat ar-ruh

Al-haya’ wal-haybah — modesty, and awe.

Two things the modern world has almost no vocabulary for. Haya is the restraint that stops you before anyone is watching. Haybah is the sense of standing before something vastly greater than yourself.

5. Purity of the stomach — taharat al-batn

Eating what is lawful, and abstaining from the unlawful and the doubtful.

Note that doubtful is included. This is not only about pork and alcohol. It reaches into how the money that bought the food was earned.

6. Purity of the body — taharat al-badan

Abandoning carnal desires, and removing dirt.

Here, at number six, is the ghusl the rest of the treatise is about. Necessary — and placed below the heart, the inward, the breast, the soul and the stomach.

7. Purity of the hands — taharat al-yadayn

Al-wara’ wal-ijtihad — scrupulousness, and striving for lawful earning.

The hands are named for what they do. A washed hand that takes what is not its own has not been purified in the sense meant here.

8. Purity of the tongue — taharat al-lisan

Adh-dhikr wal-istighfar — remembrance, and seeking forgiveness.

The tongue is not purified by silence but by use — filled with something worth saying, so there is less room for what is not.

— Tafsir Ruh al-Bayan, vol. 2, p. 355, as cited in Fazail-e-Ghusl

Why the Order Matters

A list can be read as a ranking or as a sequence. This one works as both, and it runs from the inside out: heart, inward, breast, soul — then stomach, body, hands, tongue.

The visible items come last. That is the opposite of how most people encounter religion, where the visible items are the whole of it — the beard, the scarf, the attendance — and the heart is assumed to follow.

The Prophet ﷺ put the same order more directly:

In the body there is a piece of flesh. If it is sound, the whole body is sound; and if it is corrupt, the whole body is corrupt. Truly, it is the heart.

— Sahih al-Bukhari 52; Sahih Muslim 1599

The Sentence the Whole Thing Rests On

Cleanliness is half of faith.

— Sahih Muslim 223

Read narrowly, that is a hadith about washing. Read against these eight, it is a much larger claim: that half of what faith consists of is the removal of what should not be there.

And the other half? The tradition’s answer is what fills the space afterwards — which is why the eighth kind of purity is not silence but dhikr.

Indeed Allah is Good, and accepts only what is good.

— Sahih Muslim 1015

Where to Start

Not at the top. The heart is the hardest of the eight and the least directly reachable.

Start where there is a handle. The stomach — is the money lawful. The hands — is the work honest. The tongue — what comes out of it in a normal day.

Those three are visible to you, correctable this week, and they work upwards. A person who fixes what they earn and what they say usually finds the heart has moved without being addressed directly.

We have written separately on that process: Tazkiya al-Nafs: Purifying the Self in Everyday Life.