What Do I Do If I Suffer with Incontinence of Urine?

Answered by Shaykh Yusuf Weltch

Question

What do I do if I suffer with incontinence of urine? How does that ruling affect my prayer and purification?

Answer

In the Name of Allah, the Most Merciful and Compassionate

Regarding the Prayer

If you fulfill the following condition, there is a clear dispensation in the Sacred Law for your situation:

The urine continues throughout an entire prayer time such that there is not enough time for you to perform ablution and a full prayer without urine drops coming out. [Ala’ al-Din Abidin, al-Hadiyya al-‘Ala’iyya]

Entire prayer time – the Maghrib to Isha time being the shortest and easiest to calculate this.

Know that you are not required to constantly check for urine drops. You are only required to act on reasonable surety. If you are reasonably sure that urine drops are continuing even if sporadically, you are not required to attempt making wudu and prayer during the interim time.

Please see this for more details:
Urinary Incontinence and Wudu

Regarding Purification

If you feel that despite purifying your garments, they will constantly become impure over and over again. You are not obliged to continuously purify them. Note that you are not obliged to continuously change your clothes as well. [Ibn ‘Abidin, Radd al-Muhtar]

Allah Most High says, “…for (it is) He (Who) has chosen you, and laid upon you no hardship in the religion…” [Quran, 22:78]

Hope this helps
Allah knows best
[Shaykh] Yusuf Weltch
Checked and Approved by Shaykh Faraz Rabbani

Shaykh Yusuf Weltch is a teacher of Arabic, Islamic law, and spirituality. After accepting Islam in 2008, he then completed four years at the Darul Uloom seminary in New York where he studied Arabic and the traditional sciences. He then traveled to Tarim, Yemen, where he stayed for three years studying in Dar Al-Mustafa under some of the greatest scholars of our time, including Habib Umar Bin Hafiz, Habib Kadhim al-Saqqaf, and Shaykh Umar al-Khatib. In Tarim, Shaykh Yusuf completed the memorization of the Qur’an and studied beliefs, legal methodology, hadith methodology, Qur’anic exegesis, Islamic history, and a number of texts on spirituality. He joined the SeekersGuidance faculty in the summer of 2019.