Withdrawal from the world
idea · 2 works · 2 mentions · 3 anchored passages
al-ibtiʻād ʻan hādhā al-ʻālam · separation from the world · ʻayshan rūḥānīyan · الابتعاد عن هذا العالم · عيشًا روحانيًا
in the texts
Mukhtaṣar fī ʻilm al-nafs al-insānīyah
Withdrawal from the world and its transient appetites in favour of a spiritual life, laid on man by the practical faculty and presupposed by the miracle accounts.
As for the second kind — I mean the practical faculty — it lays upon man the charge of withdrawing from this world and its passing, perishing appetites, and of living a spiritual life so far as he has strength for it, and of turning his resolve toward the intellectual pleasures that are fixed and everlasting, which neither shift nor pass away.
And if that is so, it is not unlikely, in the case of a perfect person far from worldly attachments, that his soul proceed in the governance of his body in the waking state, so that there comes about for him what comes about for another in the state of sleep.
Letters
The teaching that true renunciation is interior, not merely physical departure.
But withdrawal from the world is not to be outside it in body, but to tear the soul away from sympathy with the body, and to become without city, without home, without property, without society, without possessions, without livelihood, free of business, free of dealings, unschooled in the teachings of men, ready to receive in the heart the impressions engraved upon it by divine teaching.