In May of 2011, Sister Jann McClary and her husband Tariq moved from the Washington DC metropolitan area to establish a new home in the mountains of Colorado, building it from the ground up as part of their plan to become free of the spiritual and physical stress of modern urban life. Sister Jann is documenting her experiences for the Muslim Link. See her earlier installments at www.muslimlinkpaper.com by searching for Running for the Hills. Make sure you select Exact Phrase in the search options. TML
The john. The loo. Water closet. The head. The hamaam. C'mon, we're all adults here, you know what I'm talking about. Doing your business. Going to the bathroom. Now, what's the big deal about going to the bathroom? Everybody pretty much goes the same way, in the same place, right? Well, not exactly. The physical mechanics are basically the same. It's the spot where you drop that separates the city from the country.
Go into your tiled throne room, do your business, flush, and everything disappears in a noisy little whirlpool down the drain. Flush and forget. You never give a second thought to what happens at the other end of the pipe. Trust me, it's ugly. It's probably toxic unless it's treated. It has to be sifted and sieved, filtered and fumigated, carbonized and chemicalized before it can be redirected to a faucet and reused by you. Yes, your toilet water is recycled. Eww.
You've got two additional options if you live in the country. One is a septic tank, which is basically just a big holding tank, with or without a leach field, which spreads your stuff further out underground from your house. It's a big expense what with all the digging, pipe laying, graveling and cement pouring that typically makes money go down the drain like you-know-what.
Most country dwellers would also like to flush and forget, many of the older generation harboring non-too-fond memories of trips to an outhouse in frigid temperatures. But that was the old days. Now you can ride on down to your friendly county department of health and ask for a septic permit. The friendly department of health clerk will smile at you as she tells you the permit will cost $500. As soon as you pick yourself up off the floor she will hand you the permit application and tell you in a friendly tone that your septic application must be accompanied by a septic plan designed by a licensed septic engineer (yes, they have such things), whose plan must be approved by the county department of health in order for you to get said permit. And we don't want to go into how much this licensed septic engineer and his lovely plan will cost. And you haven't even purchased the materials to build and install this septic tank. Suffice it to say you may put out close to $2000 for the privilege of having the county tell you where you can go.
Aside from the financial aspect of it, there's the gross-out factor of what happens when you go inside your house. Each time you flush it releases a super-fine spray of water and contaminants into the air and all over your towels, toothbrushes, soap and anything else you've left in the bathroom. Oh, I'm not exaggerating. It's just that the August 2005 issue of the Journal of Applied Microbiology published a study on this stuff and it seems that the more often you flush, the more funky little pathogens dance around in the air, contaminating all your stuff. Yuck. Think about it. You go into an enclosed space, do your business, in standing water, then flush and get microscopic bits of it back on you. None of Allah's creation do their business in water, with the exception of fish and other water-dwelling critters! I dunno. Maybe they read the study.
So that leaves us with the third choice. The sunnah. Neither the Messenger of Allah (sallallahu alaihi wa sallam), nor his wives, nor any of the sahabah answered the call of nature inside a house. In numerous sahih and hasan ahaadith the words went out, or to an open space, or to go out are used. In the famous hadith of Aisha's (radiallahu anha) fitnah over the rumors surrounding her lost necklace, she mentions answering the call of nature before we had lavatories near to our houses. (Sahih al Bukhari, Book 59) Sure it's convenient to just walk a few steps, go into the bathroom and do what you gotta do. And if I visit someone who has a toilet in their bathroom, I'm not going to go run outside and look for a bush. But we just built an outhouse, and it's literally 10 steps from the kitchen. It's been dug 10 feet deep so we'll probably be long gone before we need another outhouse. It's an 8x8 building with two, count 'em, two seats! That means no more waiting and doing the hurry up, gotta go! dance. With a few more windows, a gravity-fed sink and a small propane heater, it just may be the coolest place to go in the county!
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