أَوْ لَامَسْتُمُ النِّسَاءَ
Or you have had contact with women.
“Lāmastum” has been interpreted as sexual intercourse or physical touching. The Hanafi treatment here takes the reference to intercourse, whereas the Shafiʿi treatment develops rulings concerning touch.
The issue concerns more than lexical possibility. Each interpretation yields different consequences for purification: treating every touch alike would require qualifications for particular cases, whereas the intercourse reading defines a different scope of the requirement.