RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIESworship.69 Christians also influenced pious seclusion. The ultimate
source for this practice is to be found in the isolated huts of the monks
in the Egyptian desert; but the best precedent is the case of St. Pelagia
the Harlot at Jerusalem in the fifth century, who isolated herself in a
cell closed on all sides except for a small shuttered window through
which she communicated with her visitors/O This practice was intro-
duced at Basra by the Christian convert and reputed qaq,z, Ka 'b ibn
Sur. In order to disassociate (Ar. i'tazala) himself from the sedition
of Tall;1a, az-Zubayr, and 'A'isha, he shut himself up in a hut coated
with clay, leaving only a window through which he was given food
and drink.71 This kind of isolation was given its original religious
purpose by the Basran Muslim ascetic, Mul;1riz al-Mazini (d. 693-94),
who isolated himself in a hut where he worshiped.^72 Older forms of
pious isolation in a religious structure seem to have been adopted first
at Kufa, where Sa'id ibn Jubayr (d. 712), who was a mawla of the
Banu Waliba clan of the tribe of Asad and a reciter of the Qur'an
(qari') who completed its recitation every two nights during RamaQan
from 680 on, lived in seclusion in the tribal masjid.^73
Along with pious isolation, Muslims inherited from Christians the
argument over passive and active piety, between silent meditation
detached from the world and responsible intervention to change the
world. Several monks and church leaders were engaged in evangelism
and in disputes with non-Christians in the sixth and seventh centuries.
The consequences of this activity were rivalry between Nestorians and
Monophysites, state intervention, and the problem of pagan practices
brought by converts. The quietism of Isaac of Nineveh was largely a
reaction to these consequences and a liberation of the spirit from
temporal authority. He writes:
Compare not all powers and signs that are worked in the whole
world with a man's consciously sitting in solitude. Love the ease of
solitude rather than satisfying the hunger of the world and the
converting of the multitude of heathen peoples from error unto
adoring God/^4
69 Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqiit, VI, 98; VII(2), 26.
70 H. Waddeli, The Desert Fathers (Ann Arbor, 1966), p. 187.
71 Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqiit, VII(l), 65-66.
72 Ibid., VII(l), 107-8; Peliat, Milieu ba§rien p. 97.
73 Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqiit, VI, 181-83.
74 Isaac of Nineveh "Mystic Treatises," p. 32.