Beginning With the Right in Islam (Tayammun): The Prophet’s ﷺ Loved Habit
Some Sunnahs are grand occasions that arrive once a year. Others are so small, and so constant, that a believer can live inside them from the moment he wakes until the moment he sleeps. Beginning with the right side — tayammun — belongs to the second kind. It asks for no wealth, no strength and no special time. It asks only that when you wash, when you dress, when you comb your hair and when you set about the ordinary business of your day, you begin from the right, because that is what the Messenger of Allah ﷺ loved to do.
This is not a habit reconstructed from scattered hints. It comes to us in a single, clear report from the person who watched the Prophet ﷺ at home, in the unobserved hours where habits are what they truly are: his wife Aisha, may Allah be pleased with her. She saw how he washed, how he dressed and how he groomed himself, and she summed up what she saw in one sentence that has guided Muslim daily life ever since. This article stays close to her report and its companion narration in Sahih Muslim, drawing out what beginning with the right means in purification, in dress and grooming, and in the whole run of a believer’s day.
1. A Habit Aisha Watched at Home
The report is preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari, and its wording deserves to be read slowly:
“The Prophet (ﷺ) used to like to start from the right side on wearing shoes, combing his hair and cleaning or washing himself and on doing anything else.” (Sahih al-Bukhari 168 — Sahih)
The Arabic of the narration gives this habit its name — al-tayammun, taking the right side first:
كَانَ النَّبِيُّ صلى الله عليه وسلم يُعْجِبُهُ التَّيَمُّنُ فِي تَنَعُّلِهِ وَتَرَجُّلِهِ وَطُهُورِهِ وَفِي شَأْنِهِ كُلِّهِ
Notice the shape of the sentence. It does not describe a single incident, one morning when the Prophet ﷺ happened to reach with his right hand. Aisha says he “used to like” doing this — the language of a settled, repeated preference, a pattern she observed so regularly that she could report it as his way. The things she names are deliberately ordinary: shoes, hair, washing. These are not the great public acts of religion. They are the private, repeated motions of every single day, and it is precisely there, in the motions nobody applauds, that his love of the right side showed itself.
Notice also who is reporting. Aisha was not describing a sermon she heard once in the mosque. She was describing the man she lived with — how he put on his shoes, how he combed his hair, how he washed. When the people closest to a person describe the same small habit, that habit is not performance. It is character. Tayammun, as Aisha hands it to us, is the Prophet’s ﷺ character at the level of the everyday: order, dignity and intention brought even to the tying of a shoe.
2. What Tayammun Means
Tayammun, in the wording of this narration, is simply this: to start from the right side. The Prophet ﷺ “used to like to start from the right side” — the right hand before the left, the right foot before the left, the right side of the body before the left, wherever an act has two sides to choose between. It is a direction given to the limbs before the act begins, so that even the smallest deed starts deliberately, in a chosen and honoured order, rather than by random habit.
There is something deeply fitting in the three examples Aisha chose. Wearing shoes is how a person steps out into the world. Combing the hair is how a person presents himself to others. Cleaning and washing is how a person stands before Allah in purity. Between those three, almost the whole of life is covered: going out, meeting people, and worshipping. And the narration does not stop at the three, as we will see — it opens the door to everything else besides.
It also matters that the report speaks of what the Prophet ﷺ liked. Tayammun is presented not as a burden laid on reluctant limbs but as a preference of a heart that loved order and honour in small things. For the believer who follows it, the practice is an act of love before it is an act of discipline: I begin with the right because he ﷺ loved to begin with the right.
3. The Second Report: Ablution Named First
Sahih Muslim preserves the same report from Aisha with its own wording, and the difference in arrangement is itself instructive. Where Bukhari’s narration opens with shoes, Muslim’s opens with purification:
“‘A’isha reported: The Messenger of Allah … loved to start from the right-hand side for performing ablution, for combing (the hair) and wearing the shoes.” (Sahih Muslim 268a — Sahih)
Here the habit is tied first of all to ablution — to wudu, the washing that stands at the door of every prayer. That placement makes the narration a foundation text for how a Muslim washes: when the limbs are washed in pairs, the right is washed before the left. The right hand is washed before the left hand, the right arm before the left arm, the right foot before the left foot — not as an empty formality, but as the following of a man who “loved to start from the right-hand side for performing ablution”.
The Arabic of this second report runs:
إِنْ كَانَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسلم لَيُحِبُّ التَّيَمُّنَ فِي طُهُورِهِ إِذَا تَطَهَّرَ وَفِي تَرَجُّلِهِ إِذَا تَرَجَّلَ وَفِي انْتِعَالِهِ إِذَا انْتَعَلَ
Hold the two reports together and the picture sharpens. In one, the habit is framed by its reach — shoes, combing, washing, and then everything. In the other, it is framed by its centre — ablution first, the act of worship around which the Muslim day is built. The same love is being described from two sides: tayammun is at once a rule of the prayer mat and a manner for the whole of life. A believer who absorbs it finds that the boundary between “worship” and “ordinary life” grows thin, because the same deliberate, right-beginning order runs through both.
The virtues of wudu itself — the sins that fall away with its water and the light it gives on the Day of Resurrection — are a wide subject of their own, treated in our guide to the virtues of wudu. Here it is enough to see where wudu stands in Aisha’s testimony: at the head of the list, the first home of the right-side habit.
4. Beginning With the Right in Purification and Washing
Bukhari’s wording covers this ground with a phrase broader than wudu alone: the Prophet ﷺ liked to start from the right in “cleaning or washing himself”. Wudu is the daily washing, several times over, before the prayers. But washing himself reaches further — to the full bath, to ghusl, to every act by which a Muslim purifies his body. In all of it, the pattern Aisha saw was the same: begin from the right.
In practice, this shapes the washing in a simple, memorable way. In wudu, each paired limb is washed right first and then left: the hands, the arms up to the elbows, and the feet. In the full bath, the right side of the body is washed before the left side, so that the whole act of purification runs in the order the Prophet ﷺ loved. Nothing about the essentials of the washing changes — the same limbs, the same water, the same completeness. What changes is the sequence, and with the sequence, the intention. A washing done in his order is a washing done in his company.
This is one reason the scholars of daily practice have always treated tayammun as part of the beauty of purification rather than a technical extra. Purification in Islam is already an act of dignity: the body is honoured, cleansed and presented before Allah. Beginning from the right adds to that dignity a rhythm — the honoured side honoured first — repeated so often in a day that it becomes second nature. For the step-by-step method of the washing itself, see our wudu guide, and for the full bath, our guide to ghusl in Islam, where this same right-first order is followed through.
There is also a quiet lesson in Aisha’s choice of example. She did not say the Prophet ﷺ began with the right only when people watched, or only in the mosque. She named the washing a man does in his own home. The Sunnah of the right side is a private Sunnah — practised in the bathroom and the bedroom, where no one sees and no one praises. Its reward is between the servant and his Lord, and its training ground is the unobserved hour. A habit that survives in private is a habit that has truly become one’s own.
5. Beginning With the Right in Shoes and Grooming
Two of Aisha’s three examples belong to dress and grooming: “wearing shoes, combing his hair”. Muslim’s wording carries the same pair: he loved to start from the right-hand side “for combing (the hair) and wearing the shoes.”
The shoe comes first in Bukhari’s list, and it is the most frequent act of dressing a person performs — on in the morning, off at the mosque door, on again after prayer, off at home, many times a day. Tayammun here is simplicity itself: the right foot enters its shoe first when putting them on. An act that takes two seconds becomes, dozens of times a week, a small renewal of the intention to follow the Prophet ﷺ. Few Sunnahs offer so much repetition for so little effort.
Combing the hair is the second example, and it speaks of presentation. The Prophet ﷺ cared for his appearance — he combed his hair, and he began that combing from the right. Grooming in Islam is not vanity; it is the dignity of a believer who honours the body Allah gave him and does not present himself to people in a state of neglect. Beginning the combing from the right side of the head is the same principle at work in the mirror that governs the washing at the sink: order, care, and a chosen beginning. The wider manners of cleanliness and appearance are gathered in our guide to personal hygiene in Islam.
Together, shoes and combing teach that tayammun is not confined to ritual. The narration deliberately places a rite of worship — washing — side by side with acts of pure daily life — shoes and hair — in a single sentence, under a single habit. The Prophet ﷺ did not divide his day into sacred minutes and ordinary minutes. The same hand, beginning from the same side, moved through both.
6. “And on Doing Anything Else”: A Principle for the Whole Day
The most sweeping words of the narration come at its end. After the shoes, the combing and the washing, Bukhari’s report closes:
“…and on doing anything else.” (Sahih al-Bukhari 168 — Sahih)
Four words, and the habit escapes its list. Aisha is telling us that the three examples were never a limit; they were illustrations. Wherever the Prophet ﷺ had a right side and a left side to choose between, in act after act beyond counting, he began with the right. Tayammun is therefore not really three rules about shoes, hair and water. It is a general principle of the Prophetic day: the right first, in everything to which a “first” can apply.
This is what makes the Sunnah so livable. A believer does not need to memorise a long list of special cases. He needs one instinct: when an act begins, let it begin from the right. Putting on a garment, beginning a task, stepping into the day’s work — the principle travels with him, asking at each doorway of action the same quiet question: which side first? And the answer, learned from Aisha’s report, is always the same.
The same spirit runs through the other manners of the Prophet’s ﷺ daily life. At the table, for instance, the right hand has its own honoured place in his teaching — a subject covered in full in our guide to Islamic eating etiquettes. The believer who begins with the right at the sink and at the shoe rack will find the same instinct waiting for him at the meal: the right side is the side of honour, and honouring it becomes the texture of the whole day.
7. Two Reports, One Love
It is worth pausing over the fact that Aisha’s testimony reaches us twice, in the two most authentic collections of hadith, with wording that differs slightly and meaning that does not differ at all. In Bukhari, the Prophet ﷺ “used to like to start from the right side”; in Muslim, he “loved to start from the right-hand side”. Both verbs — liking and loving — describe an inward inclination, something his heart turned toward, not merely a rule his limbs obeyed.
The lists differ in order and in fullness. Bukhari: shoes, combing, cleaning or washing, “and on doing anything else.” Muslim: ablution, combing, shoes. Read side by side, each fills out the other. Muslim names ablution explicitly, anchoring the habit in worship. Bukhari closes with the open door — “anything else” — releasing the habit into all of life. Neither report corrects the other; together they give the complete picture that a single wording alone might have narrowed.
For the ordinary reader, there is a devotional point here as well as a scholarly one. The Sunnah of the right side does not rest on one fragile thread. It is the settled, doubly-preserved testimony of the Prophet’s ﷺ own household, from the wife who knew his private habits best. Few practices of daily Islam stand on firmer or more intimate ground.
8. Building the Habit: Tayammun in an Ordinary Day
How does a believer take this Sunnah from the page into his limbs? The narration itself supplies the programme, because its examples are already the skeleton of a day. Start where Aisha starts.
At wudu. Let this be the first training ground, as it is the first item in Muslim’s list. Wash the right hand before the left, the right arm before the left, the right foot before the left, and let the order slow you down just enough to remember whose order it is. Five prayers a day means five daily rehearsals; within weeks, the right-first sequence will feel more natural than any other.
At the shoes. Put the right shoe on first. Do it at the front door, at the mosque, everywhere shoes are worn, and let the small act carry a small intention. When an act repeats this often, it stops being a decision and becomes a disposition.
At the mirror. Comb and groom beginning from the right. It costs nothing, takes no longer, and turns a moment of vanity-prone routine into a moment of following.
Through the day. Then let Bukhari’s closing words do their work — “and on doing anything else.” Begin tasks from the right where a side can be chosen. Do not strain after complicated cases; the principle is a direction, not a puzzle. The aim is a day whose beginnings, great and small, lean the way the Prophet’s ﷺ beginnings leaned.
Expect no instant transformation. Habits of the limbs are built the way this one was observed: by repetition, in private, over time. But few habits repay their small cost so richly. A man who begins with the right at the sink, the door and the mirror has placed a reminder of the Prophet ﷺ at the three most repeated doorways of his day — and a day full of such reminders is a day that keeps turning back to Allah.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. What is tayammun in Islam? Tayammun is beginning an act from the right side — the right hand, foot or side before the left. Aisha reported that the Prophet ﷺ “used to like to start from the right side on wearing shoes, combing his hair and cleaning or washing himself and on doing anything else” (Sahih al-Bukhari 168 — Sahih), and the Arabic of the narration names this habit al-tayammun.
Q2. In which acts did the Prophet ﷺ begin with the right? In the acts Aisha named: wearing shoes, combing his hair, and cleaning or washing himself — and then, in Bukhari’s closing words, “on doing anything else.” Sahih Muslim’s narration of the same report lists performing ablution, combing the hair and wearing the shoes (Sahih Muslim 268a — Sahih).
Q3. Does the hadith mention wudu specifically? Yes. In Sahih Muslim’s wording, Aisha reported that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ “loved to start from the right-hand side for performing ablution, for combing (the hair) and wearing the shoes” (Sahih Muslim 268a — Sahih). So in wudu, the right limbs are washed before the left: right hand, right arm and right foot first.
Q4. Does beginning with the right apply only to wudu, shoes and combing? No. Those three are the examples Aisha gave, but Bukhari’s narration ends with the words “and on doing anything else” — words that open the habit to every act in which a right side can be begun with. The examples are illustrations of a general principle, not limits on it.
Q5. How can I start practising tayammun today? Begin with the three acts in the narration itself: wash right before left in wudu, put the right shoe on first, and begin combing from the right. Keep the intention simple — that you begin this way because the Prophet ﷺ loved to begin this way — and then let the principle spread, act by act, through the rest of the day.