What is the ruling on clothes that were washed in a washing machine in which impure clothes were placed, knowing that the questioner suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder regarding purity?
We pray for your swift recovery from the whispers and doubts you are experiencing, and we advise you to turn away from them. Your feeling that your clothes are impure, and that everything placed in the laundry basket has become impure, is a form of waswasah (obsessive whispering); so do not pay attention to it and consider them pure, and do not preoccupy yourself with this matter. Placing something impure in the laundry basket does not necessitate that the basket itself becomes impure, or that other pure items placed in it become impure. The default state of things is purity until impurity is established with certainty. Thus, if there is doubt about the impurity of something pure, it remains pure; or if there is doubt about the purity of something impure, it remains impure, because the default is that things remain as they were. The prescribed approach is to base matters on istishab (presumption of continuity). If there is evidence of impurity, we deem it impure; otherwise, it is not recommended to avoid using something merely based on the possibility of impurity.
Summarized from the full answer at Ftawy · reviewed Sep 2, 2026
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