Isolating the Heart, Not the Body

Qāḍī Abū Bakr Ibn al-ʿArabī likewise holds that a man "becomes single," tafaqqaha wa iʿtazala, when he attains learning and then isolates himself, devoting himself to the observance of Allah's commandments and prohibitions. He then raises a case: if the times have grown so corrupt that isolation seems the only remedy — a view some hold, that people are so bad it is better to withdraw completely — two responses follow. The first: a man may isolate himself in his actions while continuing to mix with people in his physical presence. A Muslim must live within a society; there is no monasticism in Islam, no retreat to the mountains. Allah did not create the human being to stand alone: there are families, parents, siblings and relatives, and the ties of kinship, ṣilat al-raḥim, and the obligations owed to them must continue, together with the ordinary business of dealing with people. What is isolated, in this case, is not the body but the heart: the deeds, the worship, the sincerity remain apart from the people even while the person lives among them, provided the conditions of the Sharīʿah are kept and the believer remains a good example, an ambassador of Islam.

The second response applies where a person cannot succeed at this — where constant exposure corrupts him, spoils him, and he cannot withstand it. In that case physical withdrawal is permitted, though never as monasticism. One need not isolate entirely; living apart, on the outskirts, is enough where the surrounding evil is so pervasive that no effort can check it, and it becomes better to save oneself. Among the Companions, when discord broke out after the death of the Prophet (peace be upon him) — during the time of ʿUthmān, and of ʿAlī, and after — several, including the great Companion ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿUmar, withdrew into their houses for years rather than be drawn into the fitnah, reasoning that to take either side would bring trouble, and that isolation was the safer course. Some of the ʿulamāʾ did the same. There is the account of a commentator of the last century, well known among his generation, who spent twenty-eight years locked in his own house rather than be killed outside it, at a time when those who had abolished the caliphate were bent on destroying Islam altogether — he continued, through those years, writing what has become one of the finest works of tafsīr available today. This is Elmalılı Hamdi Yazır, celebrated among the last ʿulamāʾ of the Ottomans. Where the corruption without is so great that association would corrupt in turn, this licence to withdraw is given; otherwise the heart is Allah's while the hands remain with the people.