Four. Cutting off, and calling it choosing your company

The report below is sound and it says something true. Who you spend your time with shapes you, and that is a decision you get to make. It also gets used, by lonely people especially, as a warrant for removing the last two people who were still in touch, one flaw at a time, until the field is clear. Choosing your company is a thing you do when you have company. It is not a demolition method.

The Qur'an has its own answer to somebody who has sworn off a person after a real injury, and the injury behind the verse was a serious one. It does not argue that the injury was imaginary. Those who have been graced with bounty and plenty should not swear that they will no longer give to kinsmen, the poor, those who emigrated in Allah's way: let them pardon and forgive. Do you not wish that Allah should forgive you? That is an invitation addressed to the one withdrawing, and it is put in terms of what they themselves want. It is not addressed to anybody who withdrew because they were being harmed, and it should not be read that way.

Al-Ghazali puts the cost of withdrawal in one line, without calling the person who withdrew anything at all: فكل ما يستفاد من المخالطة يفوت بالعزلة وفواته من آفات العزلة. Our rendering, rather than a stored translation: everything gained from mixing is lost by seclusion, and that loss is among the harms of seclusion. Then he says what is actually gained, and the list runs in pairs. Rendering four of them: teaching and being taught, benefiting and being benefited, finding companionship and giving companionship, receiving reward and conferring it in what is owed to people. Read the second half of each pair. If your picture of yourself is somebody who takes and has nothing to give, that list was not written to reassure you, and it keeps putting the two directions side by side anyway.