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Finding islamic toilet

I am not joking with that title. Not many people, out of billions of muslims, that even think about this problem (what problem, they will ask). And out of the few that do, only a handful have the willingness to raise this issue for an open discussion. For the sake of finding a solution, let me start the discussion.

This is going to be a long article (in fact its so long that I need to break it up into two postings – at least). I will start with the why: why bother writing this article. And then I will provide some basic information on what muslims need in a toilet, and I will try to formulate the idea of islamic toilet.

In the next post, I will cover the design parts. This should be fun for architects and interior designers. I am also going to identify some common problems found around the world. Hopefully, in the end we can see some solutions coming out.

0. Why do we need this posting?

For muslims:

1. While Islamic creed teaches cleanliness as part of the faith, toilets in muslim facilities are notoriously dirty. No I am not talking about the big shining mosques in the capital cities, but the small neighborhood mosques in the heartland muslim communities. You just do not want to even glimpse at them, because then you can smell the nerve-cracking odor.
2. Cross-cultural  interactions have alienated muslims in terms of toilet. When muslims move (to study, or to work, or even to migrate) to a western country, they found toilets are less accommodating to their needs (more on these needs below). On the other hand, new buildings even in muslim countries are built with toilets that are, again, less accommodating to the muslim needs.  The western-style of toilet designing is rampant. My interaction with architects taught me that this is in fact the only style of toilet designing, because there is no such a thing as muslim-style toilet designing, at least that is taught in mainstream architecture schools. Any previous attempts to put some muslim values into the design style only provide cultural shocks (as will be shown later, probably in the second post).

For non-muslims:

1. Just FYI
2. To develop cross-cultural awareness and understanding, so that at least you would understand if muslims acts abnormally (by western standard) in toilets. If you happen to be an architect, this information would enable you to design better toilets for muslims.

So here we go.

1. What muslims need in a toilet?

Before we come to that question, there are two relevant concepts that need to be understood. The first one is the concept of aurat, and the second one is the concept of najis.

Aurat is part of the body that should not be revealed to other people. There are different opinions on the details, but the general consensus is as follows. For male the aurat is between the belly-button and the knees. For female is the whole body except the face and the hands.

With this concept, the concept of privacy for muslim has a different angle compared to the general “acceptable” privacy policy for toilet. Urinals must have partition so that the neighbor cannot accidentally see other people’s private parts. Shower must always have enclosed partitions.

Najis are the things that are religiously dirty. Out of many dirty things, there are a number of these things that fall into the category of najis. Rotten food, for example, is dirty but is not najis. The most relevant najis for toilet are urine and feces. The most important part of this concept is that muslims may not pray if there is najis on their body, their clothes, or in the place where they pray. And, as you know, muslims pray, not once but five times a day. For convinience, muslims keep themselves away from najis, because if you have najis you have to clean it up before you can pray.

That is why one of the first lessons in Islam (if we look at the classical text of islamic teachings) is about how we clean najis if we have it in our body, or our clothes, or the place where we pray. Toilet training, basically, but more extensive.

So back to the question: what muslims need in a toilet? The answer is quite simple, there are three basic requirements: (1) privacy, (2) ability to clean up from (our own) najis, (3) assurance that we will not be exposed to stray najis.

2. How do muslims clean the najis?

I am not going to bore you with the gory details of everything about cleaning najis. The basic requirements are simple: you have to get rid of the najis so that you cannot see it, you cannot smell it, and you cannot taste it.

The last one needs further explaination. It certainly does not mean that you have to taste whatever you have clean. Its just a hypothetical requirement: if you have a najis on the floor, and then you have cleaned it, the floor is considered clean when you can ensure yourself that if you were to taste the floor you will not taste the najis but floor. Of course this is only hypothetical, because even without the najis on it, you are not suppose to taste the floor. I believe that the early scholars put this requirement as additional step so that muslims has additional awareness about the najis.

On top of that basic requirements, there are many technicalities that are so diverse that I will skip it here. There are a lot of opinions about the technicalities so I will present some general consensus.

Consensus number one, it involves water. So here is the first culture shock between east and west: people from muslim countries cannot associate between toilet and tissue paper. If they find tissue paper in the toilet, they do not know what to do with it. They need water.

And this is not only for the big thing but also for the small thing. When muslims defecate or urinate, they have to clean the private parts with water. By default is a must, but there are exceptions in various situations where water is can be replaced with something else.

Consensus number two it should involve enough amount of water. Many of the original text says that the najis has to be wash “seven times”. Some muslims take this literally and they actually count the number of wash. In the old days, this probably make sense because people has water in a big tank and they take the water with a small container so that they can literally count how many times they pour the water over. But the era of water tap, counting does not really make sense. So people interpret “seven times” as “repeated times just enough” to clean the najis. It should be noted that over-consumption of water (and in fact, of everything else) is prohibited in Islam.

Consensus number three: there are exceptions to the water rules. However, while there is consensus that there are exceptions, the extent of the exception depends on the interpretation. Some like it hard, and use a very strict interpretation of the exception, some like it soft and use a very lenient interpretation to define the exception.

Again, without going into the details, below are some of the topics in the exceptions, just to give you a perspective on the diversity of the opinion.

Exception on the situation: what situation constitute the “emergency” where medium other than water can be used to clean up the najis. The religious texts says “when you cannot find water”, so some says that that is the exception: when you literally cannot find water. So a dry toilet with only a roll of tissue paper will not qualify for exception, according to this interpretation, because there is a water tap just outside where you wash your hands. On the other extreme, there are opinions that says that it is simply not convenient to insist on using water when the toilet is designed to be dry, so convinience is a reason for exception to not use water.

In between there are people who seeks the middle ground. Yes it is designed to be a dry toilet, but water is still available. No, it is not convinient to insist on using water as in wet toilet, so some kind of improvisation is needed. More on this later.

The second exception is on the medium used: if not water then what? The religious text, that is relevant for the situation in the desert environment, says that stones should be used if there is no water. At least three stones (and only stones with smooth surface, btw) must be used. But stone is totally irrelevant for a multi-story building, you cannot expect somebody to rush down the building just to collect some stones while on the way to the toilet.

For this reason, another opinion says that (dry) toilet tissue is a valid medium to wash the najis. Logically, using toilet tissue is cleaner then using stone. However, the main argumen against this opinion remains: water is available so there is no reason to use other medium.

The middle way: wet toilet tissue. My friend has posted this article in his blog (in Indonesian language only). In a nutshell, put some water over several (three-four) sheets of toilet tissue. That in effect becomes the source of water, so instead of pouring water, just squeeze the wet tissue to extract all the water. The argument against this opinion is the amount of water provided by the wet tissue, it is simply too little to clean.

Yet another solution: dry tissue followed by the wet tissue. Cleaning up with dry toilet tissue will reduce the amount of water needed to clean the najis. But then again, this is relevant only for the small one (urinating). For the big one, I do not think wet tissue will do the job, and at least a small bottle of water is needed. So keep those recycled bottle of mineral water handy.

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That’a all folks, its already long for an introduction. Let me know in the comment section below if I missed anything. I will continue with the second post later next week.