Oral hygiene in the Shari'ah: a thousand-year-old conversation between Islam's schools of legal thought.

By examining Islam's jurisprudential literature about oral hygiene, this paper traces the scholarly discussions of jurists in the years after the Prophet Muhammad's passing until the present day. While previous inquiries into this subject have focused on the novelty of the Prophet's use of a tooth-stick, the focus of this effort is not to serve as a material history of tools. Rather, this paper focuses on the reasons for the religious mandate in Islam to maintain optimal oral hygiene. It does so by triangulating the varioustheories of oral hygiene expounded by jurists over time and geography.