Answer
Wa `alaykum As-Salamu wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuh.
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
In this fatwa:
While some scholars see that a Muslim who touches his private parts should renew his wudu, others are of the opinion that if one touches it with desire, he has to do wudu, and if he does that without desire, he does not have to do wudu.
Sheikh Sayyed Sabiq states in his well-known book Fiqh As-Sunnah:
Busrah bint Safwan narrated that the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said, “Whoever touches his sexual organ cannot pray until he performs ablution.” (Al-Bukhari)
In the narration of Ahmad and An-Nasa’i, Busrah heard the Prophet saying, “Ablution is to be made by a person who touches his sexual organ.”
This is general and encompasses touching one’s own sexual organs or touching somebody else’s.
Abu Hurairah reported the Prophet (peace and blessings be of Allah upon him) as saying, “Whoever touches his sexual organ without any covering (between them) must perform ablution.” (Ahmad, Ibn Hibban and Al-Hakim)
However, the Hanifi scholars are of the opinion that touching the sexual organ does not nullify ablution, based on the following hadith, “A man asked the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) if touching the penis necessitates performing ablution. The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said: “No, it is just a part of you.” (Reported by “the five” (five scholars of Hadith). Ibn Hibban classified it as sahih, and Ibn al-Madini said, “It is better than the Hadith of Busrah.”)
Allah Almighty knows best.
Editor’s note: This fatwa is from Ask the Scholar’s archive and was originally published at an earlier date.