The Inner and the Outer

It would not be very intelligent of a rational being to confine this notion of cleanliness to the physical alone. By simple deduction it can be understood that this same cleanliness applies to both the outer and the inner, the ẓāhir and the bāṭin. Physical cleanliness matters greatly, but the spiritual cleanliness of the heart is perhaps the more important of the two, and equally so, because Allah (swt) is constantly scanning the heart. The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) says that Allah (swt) does not look at a person's outer form at all — whether fat or thin, plain or striking, tall or short, black, green, purple or pink — nor does He look at whether someone is young or old; Allah (swt) is constantly scanning the condition of the heart.

One of the companions observed, after the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) had passed away, that the very first bidʿah, the first innovation, to appear in this ummah was the discovery of a particular plant from which soap — a cleansing agent — could be made, so that people became obsessed with their physical hygiene: they washed themselves and their clothing so thoroughly that not the smallest, tiniest speck of dust was ever allowed to remain on them, and they made quite certain of it, absolutely obsessed with the matter. And yet, he said, in the time of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) the body, too, was kept clean — it could hardly be otherwise, given the need for ṭahārah before ṣalāh — but far greater anxiety, far greater watchfulness, was given in that time to the cleanliness of the heart: whether it carried any of the diseases of the nafs al-ammārah, any greed, any envy, any jealousy, any ḥubb al-dunyā, any ghībah, any namīmah, any of the diseases of bukhl, of stinginess. The heart was watched over so closely, taken such care of, in the presence of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him). Since then, people have largely forgotten that particular cleansing of the inner, and have turned all their attention to the outer instead.

Cleanliness, ṭahārah, therefore divides into two kinds. One is the outer cleanliness, the province of fiqh, treated in Kitāb al-Ṭahārah, the book of cleanliness — open any book of fiqh and it will explain exactly how to cleanse the outer, but it will never once tell how to cleanse the inner, the cleanliness of the inner. Tazkiyat al-nafs, or tazkiyat al-qalb, is the domain of another faculty of the Sharīʿah altogether, another branch entirely, called taṣawwuf — a different field, concerned with ʿilm al-iḥsān, with ʿilm al-tazkiyah. Fiqh does not come close to this one.