The Five Acts of Fitrah

What Fitrah Means Here

Fitrah is the original, unspoiled nature on which Allah created human beings — the disposition that recognises its Creator before anything is taught to it. The Qur'an names it once, in a verse the scholars return to whenever the word appears:

The same word carries the Prophet's ﷺ most famous statement about every newborn child — that a person begins life already inclined toward tawḥīd, and is turned away from it afterwards:

So it is striking that the Prophet ﷺ used this same weighty word for a short list of grooming habits. The scholars explain the link in two ways, and both are useful. First, these are the practices the prophets before him were given, so keeping them is keeping to the original way — the repository's rendering of one narration of the list glosses fitrah here as the tradition of the prophets. Second, they are what an uncorrupted human nature would arrive at on its own: a body kept clean, hair kept in order, a mouth that does not offend. Religion here is not adding a strange burden; it is protecting an instinct that neglect and custom erode.

Refs: Quran 30:30; Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 4775; Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 6297.

The Hadith of the Five

The core text is short enough to memorise in a sitting, and it is in both Ṣaḥīḥs from Abū Hurayra (ra):

Muslim records the same narration, and even preserves the narrator's hesitation over whether the Prophet ﷺ said five are of the fitrah or five are akin to the fitrah — a small honesty in transmission that is worth noticing:

Tirmidhī records it from the same Companion, and his is the version in which the five Arabic terms — the words every later book of fiqh uses for them — can be read directly:

The five are listed in a different order in almost every narration, which tells you the order is not the point. What is fixed is the set:

• Khitān — circumcision.
• Istiḥdād — removing the pubic hair.
• Qaṣṣ ash-shārib — cutting the moustache short.
• Taqlīm al-aẓfār — clipping the fingernails and toenails.
• Natf al-ibṭ — removing the underarm hair.

Four of the five are simple, private, and cost nothing: a nail clipper, a razor, five minutes. That is exactly why they are worth treating as their own topic. Most of the Sunnah a person reads about is occasional; this is a set of habits that touches every week of a life, and the Prophet ﷺ attached the word fitrah to it.

Refs: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 5891, 5889, 5890, 6297; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim — site reader nos. 503 and 504.

Five, or Ten? The Longer List

A second narration, from ʿĀʾisha (ra), gives a longer list — and the narrator openly admits he has forgotten one of the items. Ḥadīth scholars keep such admissions in the text rather than tidying them away, and the site keeps them too:

The Sunan carry the same idea from ʿAmmār ibn Yāsir (ra), with rinsing the mouth and snuffing water named explicitly — the two acts a Muslim already performs in every wuḍūʾ:

There is no contradiction between five and ten. The scholars read the shorter narration as naming the most emphasised of a wider category, not as closing the list; the acts of fitrah are a genus, and the Prophet ﷺ named different members of it on different occasions. Note that the longer list is what brings the siwāk and the beard into the discussion at all — neither appears among the five.

Refs: Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim — site reader nos. 510 and 511; Sunan Abī Dāwūd 54.

The Siwāk: The Sunnah He Almost Made Obligatory

The siwāk is a soft twig — classically from the arāk tree — chewed at one end into fibres and used on the teeth and gums. Of everything on this page it received the heaviest emphasis, and the clearest statement of its limit. The Prophet ﷺ said he would have commanded it, and the only thing that held him back was that it would burden the ummah:

That single sentence settles the ruling from two directions at once. It is not obligatory — because he did not command it. And it is weightier than an ordinary recommendation — because he wanted to. The reason given is mercy, not indifference. ʿĀʾisha (ra) reported the reason on the other side, what the siwāk is actually for:

A longer and better-known wording circulates — that Jibrīl kept urging the siwāk upon the Prophet ﷺ until he feared it would be made obligatory. Its route in this repository is Sunan Ibn Mājah 289, which is graded ḍaʿīf in the site's hadith repository, so it is mentioned here and not built upon. The two Ṣaḥīḥs above are more than enough for the point.

Refs: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 887, 888, 7240; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim — site reader no. 495; Sunan an-Nasāʾī 5; Sunan Ibn Mājah 289 (ḍaʿīf).

When the Siwāk Is Most Emphasised

The Sunnah does not leave it at a general encouragement. Four moments are named in the narrations, and each is documented separately.

• On waking from sleep, at night and in the morning — this is the most frequently reported of all.
• Before every prayer, and so before wuḍūʾ, since the two run together in practice.
• On entering the house — the first thing he ﷺ did on coming home.
• On Friday, alongside the ghusl and the perfume for Jumuʿah.

A point of adab worth adding, since it sits in the same chapter: the Prophet ﷺ was shown in a dream using a siwāk with two men present, and was corrected when he offered it to the younger — the elder was to be served first. Small acts of cleanliness still travel inside the etiquette of a room.

Refs: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 245, 246, 880, 1136; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim — site reader nos. 496, 497, 499, 502.

Forty Days: The Outer Limit

This is the part of the topic most people have never been told, and it is the one that turns a vague virtue into something a person can actually keep. Anas ibn Mālik (ra) reported that a time was fixed for the Companions — not a schedule to follow, but a line not to cross:

Read it carefully. Forty is a maximum, not a target. Nobody is being told to clip their nails every forty days; they are being told that leaving these things past forty days is outside the Sunnah. In ordinary life a person will attend to them far more often, and should — a nail or a hair that is ready is dealt with when it is ready. The forty-day line exists to name the point at which neglect becomes a religious matter rather than a personal one.

The scholars differ over the weight of that line. Most treat exceeding it as disliked (makrūh) rather than sinful, since the acts themselves are sunnah; some treat the wording as a genuine prohibition of neglect, because a limit that carries no consequence is not a limit. Both readings agree on the practical outcome, so the difference rarely changes what anyone does.

Refs: Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim — site reader no. 505; Sunan an-Nasāʾī 14; Jāmiʿ at-Tirmidhī 2759; Sunan Abī Dāwūd 4200.

The Moustache — and the Beard That Travels With It

Cutting the moustache is one of the five. In almost every narration it arrives paired with an instruction about the beard, and the pairing is deliberate: the two together are what mark out a distinct appearance.

An-Nasāʾī records the second wording with its Arabic, and the verb in it is the whole reason for the first disagreement below — iḥfāʾ, taking the moustache right down, where al-Bukhārī's wording above has qaṣṣ, cutting it short:

Two genuine differences live here, and neither should be smoothed over. On the moustache, the narrations use two different verbs — one meaning to trim it short, the other to take it right down. The majority of scholars hold that trimming until the edge of the upper lip is clear fulfils the Sunnah; a body of scholars, particularly among the Ḥanafīs and some of the Salaf, held that taking it down closely is what the second wording asks for. Both are acting on a text.

On the beard, the command is worded as a command, and the four schools accordingly treated shaving it as impermissible or at least strongly disliked, with a well-known further difference over trimming what exceeds a fist's length. This page states the position rather than argues it: the instruction in the ḥadīth is an order, and the scholarly disagreement is about its degree of bindingness, not about whether it was said. Note also that the beard belongs to the ten, not to the five.

Refs: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 5893, 5888; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim — site reader nos. 507, 508, 509; Sunan an-Nasāʾī 15; Jāmiʿ at-Tirmidhī 2763; Sunan Abī Dāwūd 4199.

Khitān — Circumcision

Circumcision is the first item named in the ḥadīth of the five, and it is the only one that is done once in a lifetime. Its lineage in the Sunnah runs back to Ibrāhīm (as):

The scholars differ over its ruling for males. The Shāfiʿīs and Ḥanbalīs hold it obligatory, reading it as a mark of the millah of Ibrāhīm and as a precondition for the purity required in prayer, since the foreskin retains impurity. The Ḥanafīs and Mālikīs hold it a confirmed sunnah — strongly emphasised, its neglect blameworthy, but not a sin that invalidates worship. This is an old and settled disagreement between the schools, and neither side censures the other.

On timing, there is no authentic text in this repository that fixes a day. The common practice of doing it in infancy, sometimes alongside the ʿaqīqah, rests on the reports about the Prophet's ﷺ grandsons and on the reasoning that it is easier and heals faster early. What the scholars do agree on is that it should be done before the child reaches bulūgh, when the rulings of an adult begin to apply.

On women, the ḥadīth of the five names khitān without specifying, and the only narration in this repository that touches the question directly is Sunan Abī Dāwūd 5271 — in whose own entry Abū Dāwūd records that the report is not strong and is transmitted in mursal form, with a link missing from its chain. Nothing binding can be built on a chain its own compiler describes that way, and the site does not present it as evidence for a practice. The overriding principles of the Sharīʿah — that harm is removed, and that no harm may be caused — govern here, and a great many contemporary scholars and authorities have ruled accordingly against the cutting practices grouped under this name where they cause harm.

Refs: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 6298; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim — site reader no. 5985; Sunan Abī Dāwūd 5271 (its compiler records the chain as weak and mursal).

Istiḥdād, the Nails, and the Underarms

The remaining three are the routine of it. Istiḥdād takes its name from the iron blade (ḥadīd) once used for it; the texts name shaving, and the scholars have always held that any effective method of removal fulfils it — the aim is removal, not a particular tool. The same reasoning settles the underarm hair: the narrations say plucking (natf), which is what was done, and the majority hold that shaving, creams, or any other means achieve the purpose, though plucking is what the wording names and so is the more complete following of it for anyone who can bear it.

The nails are the easiest of the five and the most often left. There is no fixed order and no fixed day; there is a fixed outer limit of forty. The general Sunnah of beginning with the right — established across the Prophet's ﷺ habits — is a reasonable thing to carry into it, and this is why many scholars recommended starting from the right hand:

One caution about privacy. These are acts of the ʿawrah, done alone. The rules of ʿawrah are not suspended for grooming, and nothing here licenses exposure before others; where medical assistance is genuinely needed, necessity is judged by its own measure.

Refs: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 5891, 168, 5854; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim — site reader nos. 503, 505.

Cleanliness Is Owed to People, Not Only to Prayer

It would be easy to file all of this under ritual purity. The Sunnah does not. In one narration the Prophet ﷺ held a returning army back from entering Madinah at once, so that households would have time to make themselves presentable to one another — the reason given is domestic, not ritual:

That is the frame the five acts sit in. They are owed to a spouse, to the people who sit next to you in the ṣaff, to whoever shares your air. A mouth cleaned before prayer is worship; a mouth cleaned before speaking to a person is ḥayāʾ and consideration, and the Sunnah treats the two as one habit approached from opposite sides. See also the adab of sleeping and waking, where the siwāk on rising belongs, and the wider portrait in the Sunnah of the Prophet.

Refs: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 5245, 5079, 5247.

Teaching It to Children

Because four of the five become due at puberty, the habit has to be built before it is needed. A child who has been clipping their own nails and using a toothbrush since they were small does not experience bulūgh as a sudden list of obligations; the grooming is already theirs, and only its meaning changes. That is the practical case for treating this as a parenting topic and not only a fiqh one — see Raising Children.

One prohibition that belongs to childhood specifically: qazaʿ, shaving part of a child's head and leaving tufts elsewhere.

Scholars differ over how far this extends to contemporary haircuts. The reported reason is that a head half-shaved and half-left is neither one thing nor the other; those who apply it broadly include any style built on that pattern, while others restrict the prohibition to what the narration literally describes. Where a difference is this live, a page like this should report it rather than resolve it.

Refs: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 5921, 5920.

Does a Toothbrush Count?

The most common question on this topic has no ḥadīth on either side of it, and the honest answer says so. The narrations state the purpose plainly — purification of the mouth, and something that pleases the Lord — and a toothbrush and paste achieve that purpose at least as well as a twig. On that basis a great many contemporary scholars hold that the sunnah of cleaning the mouth is attained by a toothbrush, and that a person who brushes before ṣalāh has done what was asked.

Others answer that the Prophet ﷺ named a specific instrument that was available to him and used it throughout his life, and that following the named means is itself part of the following — so the fuller sunnah is the arāk stick, with the toothbrush attaining the purpose but not the specific form. This is reasoning about a means, not a dispute over a text, and it is stated here as such. In practice most people can do both without difficulty, and a siwāk kept in a pocket is easy to use at the masjid where a toothbrush is not.

Refs: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 887; Sunan an-Nasāʾī 5; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim — site reader no. 495.

At a Glance