between your hearts.” (Āl ʿImrān 103).
It is also reported from ʿUmar that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said, “Keep to the congregation and beware of division, for Satan is with the lone individual and is farther from two. Whoever longs for the spaciousness of Paradise, let him cling to the congregation.” [al-Tirmidhī 2165]
Among the benefits of gathering are: learning and teaching, giving benefit and receiving it, fulfilling mutual rights by meeting for acts of worship, spreading peace, returning greetings, visiting the sick, attending funerals, observing the commendable social customs that prevail among Muslims, fostering harmony and the faith-based brotherhood that arises from loving one another for Allah’s sake, enjoining what is right, forbidding wrong, and meeting people’s needs. All of this is lost in seclusion.
The decisive word on this matter is that both seclusion and mixing have well-known benefits and harms. Seclusion offers safety and distance from evil; however, social interaction is praiseworthy and preferable in two situations.
First: when a person is of benefit to his community—benefiting them through his knowledge by teaching, issuing fatwas, guiding, judging, and the like; or when he possesses social standing and his word carries weight, enabling him to secure laudable mediations and sought-after intercessions, becoming—after Allah—the refuge of the oppressed and those whose rights are denied; or when he is a man of charity and generosity, so that the needy find with him the fulfillment of their wants and the alleviation of their poverty. Such people are the pillars of society. Their withdrawal harms themselves, by depriving them of the reward that reaches others, and harms others, for the needy, the students, the wronged, and the destitute would lose the one who helps them with their affairs.
The best that can be said is that whoever possesses a heeded word, an effective influence, and a benefit that extends to others—whether through knowledge, status, or virtue—should not seclude himself, but should be