Anas said that God’s messenger used to perform ablution for every prayer, but that they made the ablution serve as long as they did nothing which broke the state of ceremonial purity.
‘Uthman said that God’s messenger performed each detail of ablution three times and then said, “This is how I perform ablution, how the prophets before me performed it, and how Abraham performed it.”
Razin transmitted these two traditions, but in his commentary on Muslim Nawawi declared the second to be weak.
Muhammad b. Yahya b. Hibban said that he asked ‘Ubaidallah b. ‘Abdallah b. ‘Umar from whom ‘Abdallah b. ‘Umar got the practice of performing ablution for every prayer whether he was in a state of purity or not, and he replied that Asma’ daughter of Zaid b. al-Khattab told him that ‘Abdallah b. Hanzala b. Abu ‘Amir al-Ghasil told her that God’s messenger was commanded to perform ablution for every prayer whether in a state of purity or not; but when that became a burden to God’s messenger he was commanded to use the tooth-stick before every time of prayer, and the performance of ablution was remitted to him unless his state of purity had been broken. He said that ‘Abdallah considered that he had power to do that, so he did it up to the time of his death.
