As-Sadaqa
Friendship between equals, its duties, and the room the house leaves it.
THE WORD
Sadaqa, suhba, ukhuwwa
Arabic has three words where English has one, and the distinction governs everything that follows. Ṣuḥba is company, the fact of keeping someone's hours and sharing his days, which in a house of residence is given rather than chosen. Ukhuwwa is elective brotherhood, the bond the Prophet instituted at Medina by pairing each emigrant from Mecca with a man of the city, so that a chosen tie might stand beside the tie of blood. Ṣadāqa is what two men build once they have recognised one another and have no reason to stand together other than that recognition.
The house says ṣuḥba for the common life, which is organised, and ṣadāqa for friendship, which is not. This page treats the second, since the first is already everywhere else on this site.
THE EIGHT DUTIES
What a friend owes a friend
The reference book exists, it is old, and it is precise. Al-Ghazālī devotes the fifteenth book of the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn to the question, the Ādāb aṣ-ṣuḥba wa-l-muʿāshara, and there enumerates eight duties a friend owes a friend. They are usually read as a morality; they read better as a rule, since each of them names an act rather than a feeling.
- Property (al-māl). To open one's purse before it is asked for, and, according to the degree of the friendship, to stop distinguishing what is one's own from what is the other's.
- Person (an-nafs). To serve with one's own body and go before the need without waiting to be called, which is exactly what the house asks of the younger man toward the one he answers for.
- The tongue that keeps silent. Not to repeat his faults, not to carry to him what is said against him, to keep his secret as God covers faults.
- The tongue that speaks. To say his good in his absence, and to say to his face what it would cost him to ignore, since obliging silence is another form of desertion.
- Forgiveness (al-ʿafw). To remit the fault before it is excused; the same book relays the counsel of seeking seventy excuses for a brother before blaming him.
- Prayer (ad-duʿāʾ). To ask for him what one asks for oneself, in his life and after his death.
- Loyalty and sincerity (al-wafāʾ wa-l-ikhlāṣ). To hold to the end, and beyond him toward his household, without the constancy depending on the profit drawn from it.
- Relief (at-takhfīf). To spare a friend ceremony and not make him bear the cost of one's own presence; a friendship in which one must always be careful is no rest.
The eighth is the one that gets forgotten, and it is the only one that tells a friend from a man under obligation. The first seven ask that something be given; the last asks that nothing be charged, which presumes a trust no rule can produce and that a rule can only refrain from obstructing.
THE ONE WHO IS CHOSEN
The man one takes as a friend
The same book describes the man it is worth going toward. One of intelligence and religion; who keeps a secret as God covers faults; whose regard does not change according to whether you rise or fall; who is the same in your presence and in your absence; and who holds no bitterness at the good that comes to you. Al-Ghazālī adds that whoever looks for a brother without fault will remain alone, and that whoever agrees to carry his weight will find many.
In the house this description has one precise consequence. A man does not choose his workshop, nor his place at the table, nor his dormitory, nor the maalem under whom he works, and no more does he choose those with whom he prays five times a day. A friend he does choose. It is the one election the house leaves entirely free, and it holds to it, because a man who has chosen nothing has nothing to stay faithful to. At-Tadbir →
CORDOBA
Ibn Hazm, and the helpful brother
The Andalusian ancestry of this page is a book written around 1022, Ibn Ḥazm's Ṭawq al-ḥamāma, thirty chapters on love, its causes and its accidents. One of those chapters is given to the helpful brother, the friend who carries the message, keeps the secret, takes the difficult part upon himself and asks nothing in return. Ibn Ḥazm also speaks there of the comradeship of youth, which he holds to be an attachment established by God and for which he gives thanks.
The book closes on two chapters, the vileness of sinning and the virtue of continence. The greatest Andalusian treatise on the passions thus ends on restraint, and it is that ancestry the house claims: a culture that named desire exactly, and did not for all that make it the measure of everything.
IN THE HOUSE
The room the house leaves it
A friendship cannot be decreed, and the house does not try. What can be arranged is the space in which it becomes possible: the common table where men eat seated close to one another, the workshop where two of them work side by side for months on the same material, the walk to the mosque, the evening, the silence after Ishā. The rest comes on its own, or does not come.
كَم صَديقٍ عَرَفتُهُ بِصَديقٍ
صارَ أَحظى مِنَ الصَديقِ العَتيقِ
وَرَفيقٍ رافَقتُهُ في طَريقٍ
صارَ بَعدَ الطَريقِ خَيرَ رَفيقِ
"How many friends I have come to know through a friend, who became dearer than the friend of old; how many companions I walked a road with, who became, the road once ended, the best of companions." — al-Buhturī, 9th century
What the poet says is what a ṣāniʿ lives at Dar al-Hiraf: the soundest friendship does not precede the shared ordeal, it is born of it. Two men who share the workshop, the table and the prayer become brothers through the time spent side by side, and not through a declaration.
The house sets one limit here, and it holds in both directions. A friendship that calculates stops being one, and no man uses a friend to obtain from the house what he would not obtain alone. A friendship put on display likewise stops being one, and feeling shown becomes a way of pressing on others. The rest is no one's business, least of all the rule's. At-Tahkim →
The terms on this page are gathered in the glossary of the house.