Stay in Touch

3.11 STAY IN TOUCH
If you cannot visit your relatives, friends or acquaintances, you should still keep in touch by calling them or sending them a letter. This will leave them with a deep amicable impression, and will keep the relationship alive. Al-Fadhl ibn Marwan, the vizier if the Abbasid Khalifah al-Mu’tasim said, ‘Inquiring about friends is [like] meeting them.’

In this regard, I would like to quote two poems:

If dear friends missed meeting each other
Then, the best meeting is a letter

I will be grateful every day
To a friend sending greetings while far away

3.11 A BRIEF ADVICE TO MY SISTERS
A specific advice to my dear Muslim sisters: If you want to visit your relatives or your Muslim sisters, carefully select the day and the hour of your visit and its duration. There are appropriate and inappropriate times for paying visits even to relatives and friends.

Do your best to make the visit a nice, brief, and pleasant one. Avoid turning it into a boring, wearisome, inquisitive and lengthy visit. Instead, it should be a visit whose purpose is to rekindle and nourish an old friendship or kinship. The visit is desirable if it is short and considerate, and it is undesirable if it is long and tedious during which conversation moves from being purposeful and valuable to being aimless and useless. The honourable follower Mohammed ibn Shihab Al-Zuhri said: ‘When a meeting becomes too long, Satan increasingly participates in it.’

Make sure that during a visit that most, if not all of your talk, is of value and benefit. Keep away form backbiting, gossip, and idle talk. Astute Muslim women do not have time for such nonsense

from the book ISLAMIC MANNERS
By Shaykh Abdul-Fattaah Abu Ghuddah (RA)