Underlying the problems considered in this chapter is a straightforward clash of two values: it is a good thing to stop wrongdoing, but a bad thing to violate privacy. As the Mālikī Ibn al-Rabīʿ al-Khashshāb (d. 956f.) put it, the believer's home (bayt al-muʾmin) is his castle (ḥirz) – or at least it may be (a qualification we will come to). How then do the scholars seek to reconcile the conflicting demands of the two values?

Two things make it harder to answer this question. One is that the scholars do not possess any single concept equivalent to our notion of privacy; what they have is rather a cluster of related concerns. The other is that in their discussions of forbidding wrong they do not give their thinking on these concerns any very systematic shape – we look in vain for an equivalent of the simple schemas that provided backbone for previous chapters. Perhaps related to this, we do not encounter any dramatic polarisations of scholarly opinion at the intersection of privacy and forbidding wrong. But the material is nevertheless quite rich, and it articulates real tensions.

The immunity of hidden wrongs

It is a basic principle that, to be a valid target of the duty, a wrong must in some way be public knowledge. If a wrong is private in the sense that we do not know about it, it is beyond the scope of the duty.