and mocked, do not sit with them until they engage in another conversation. Otherwise, you would be like them.”

This means that one should not be present where wrongdoing occurs without a need to be there. For example, one must not sit with people drinking wine, nor accept an invitation to a wedding feast where there is wine and the playing of wind instruments, and so forth. This does not apply to someone who attends in order to condemn their wrongdoing, or who is present against his will.

Hence the saying:

“Someone present at wrongdoing is like the one committing it.”

And the hadith states:

“Whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day must not sit at a table where wine is being drunk.”

This kind of shunning is akin to a person’s keeping himself from committing wrongdoing. As the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said:

“The emigrant is the one who abandons what Allah has forbidden.”

This category includes migration from a land of disbelief and wickedness to a land of Islam and faith. It means abandoning residence among disbelievers and hypocrites who do not allow a person to do what Allah has commanded. The words of Allah Most High also fall under this heading:

“And shun defilement.”

The second kind is shunning as a disciplinary measure. This means shunning someone who openly commits wrongdoing until he repents of it, just as

“the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and the Muslims shunned the three who were left behind until Allah revealed that He had accepted their repentance,”

when it became evident that, without an excuse, they had failed to undertake the jihad that was individually obligatory upon them. He did not, however, shun those who outwardly displayed goodness