Khalwa
Retreat: voluntary seclusion for invocation and recollection, practised under the guide's direction.
Khalwa comes from khala, to be alone, empty: it is the retreat, the time of seclusion the Sufi takes to do one thing only: invoke, recollect himself, let the heart loosen from the world. The practice goes back to the origins: the caves and cells of the first ascetics were khalwas.
The practice takes very different forms from one path to another: the forty-day retreat (arba’iniyya) of the ancients, or the short daily retreat, at night or dawn, that most traditions recommend to the ordinary disciple. The masters’ common rule: khalwa is not improvised. Suhrawardi, in the ʿAwarif, makes it a school in its own right that presupposes the direction of the murshid, for solitude delivers the soul to what it carries of most fragile.
The Qadiriya Boutchichiya path has no cloistering: its ‘retreat’ is lived in the world, in faithfulness to the wird and the silence of the morning. On the opposite of withdrawal, the companionship of the group, see suhba.