The concluding part of the examination of the issue of Dog and its ownership by Muslims.

1. DOG OWNERSHIP: THE ISLAMIC PERSPECTIVE (2).
As the debate continues and rages on, on the issue of dogs, its
ownership or not either as pets, guards or for other purposes in lslam,
those Islamic scholars, jurists and puritans, who hold the strong view
that a true and devout Muslim must not have anything to do with dogs,
talk less of its ownership for whatever purpose believe dogs are impure
animals, both physically and spiritually. They picked up and justified
their argument from one of the thousands of hadiths-the traditional
account of the life and teachings of the Prophet (PBUH) where it was
reported that the Prophet instructed that if a dog, regardless of the
color, licks a container, the container must be washed seven times,
with the sprinkling of dust in one of the washings. Different versions of
the same report specify that the container be washed once, three, or
five times, or omit the reference to the sprinkling of dust. The essential
point conveyed in these reports is that dogs are impure animals, or, at
least, that their saliva is a contaminant that voids a Muslim’s ritual
purity.
Those on the other side of the divide believe and countered that
everything found in nature is presumed to be pure unless proven
otherwise, either through experience or text. Ruling that the traditions
mentioned above are not of sufficient reliability or authenticity so as to
overcome the presumption of purity, they argued that dogs are pure
animals. Accordingly, they maintained that dogs do not void a Muslim’s
prayer or ritual purity.
These jurists argued that this command mandating that a vessel be
washed a number of times was intended as a precautionary health
measure. They argued that the Prophet’s tradition on this issue was
intended to apply only to dogs at risk of being infected by the rabies
virus. This is because medically the rabies virus is shed in the saliva of

2. an infected dog. Hence, if a dog is not a possible carrier of rabies, it is
presumed to be pure and that this does not lead to prohibition of owning
a pet dog! It simply tells us what to do if we choose to own a dog. The
dog owner must be constantly aware that he or she, the owner, is always
unclean because of the dog and therefore must maintain the cleanliness
of himself or herself and that of the dog. If the owner is up to that
responsibility, then there is nothing to prohibit him or her from owning a
pet dog.
They also believe strongly that despite the attribution (falsely or
otherwise) to the Prophet of a large number of traditions hostile to dogs,
for a variety of reasons, these pre-modern Muslim scholars challenged
this orientation. The Qur’an, the divine book of Islam, does not condemn
dogs as impure or evil. In addition, a large number of early reports,
probably reflecting historical practice, contradicted the dog-hostile
traditions. For instance, several reports indicated that the Prophet’s
young cousins and some of the companions owned puppies. Other
reports indicated that the Prophet prayed while a dog played in the
vicinity. In addition, there is considerable historical evidence that dogs
roamed freely in Medina and even entered the Prophet’s mosque. A
particularly interesting tradition attributed to the Prophet asserted that a
prostitute, and in some versions, a sinning man, secured their places in
Heaven by saving the life of a dog dying of thirst in the desert.
It is a confirmed fact that the hostility against dogs and by extension its
ownership emanated from the practice in the ancient and medieval age
where dogs were often portrayed as an oppressive instrument in the
hands of despotic and unjust rulers. And as was the practice in the premodern Middle East region, as an expression of contempt or
deprecation, at times dogs were hung or buried with the corpses of
dissidents or rebels. This cultural anti-dog prejudice survived into
modern times, and as a result, the ownership of dogs continues to be
socially frowned upon.

3. In the contemporary Muslim world, dog ownership is common only
among Bedouins, law enforcement, and the Westernized higher classes.
As a matter of fact, it is rather striking that, to a very large extent,
modern Muslims are unaware of the pre-modern juristic determinations
that vindicated the purity of dogs. Nevertheless, this in itself is a
measure of the ambiguous fortunes of the dynamics between Islamic law
and nature in modernity.
Aside from the legal discourses, dogs occupied an elusive position in
Muslim culture. On the one hand, in Arabic literature dogs were often
portrayed as a symbol of highly esteemed virtues such as self-sacrifice
and loyalty. Ibn Al-Marzuban, a great Islamic scholar, jurist and author
even wrote a fascinating treatise titled,’ The Book of the Superiority of
Dogs over Many of Those Who Wear Clothes’, which contrasts the
loyalty and faithfulness of dogs to the treachery and fickleness of human
beings.
In the end, this hue and cry about dog and its ownership by Muslims
might just be a matter of giving a dog a bad name to hang it. It is left for
the discerning Muslim to decide his or her relationship with dog and its
ownership.