Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

in shā
’
 Allāh
taʿālā
I encourage you to read and think about them on your own. Surah forty-
nine from beginning to end; just ponder the surah and what it means to you as a
Muslim. I just wanted to highlight one—not even a whole 
āyah
—one expression
from within one 
āyah
; and the expression that this reminder is dedicated to is:
Believers, avoid being excessively suspicious, for some suspicion is a
sin…
(Al-Hujurāt 49: 12)
This is all I’m going to be thinking about with you in this reminder. Roughly
translated the 
āyah
says, those of you who claim to believe avoid, circumvent or
stay away as much as possible from making assumptions (
al-ẓann
)—
inna baʿḍ
al-ẓann ithm
—no doubt after assumption comes sin. This is a rough translation

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of what the 
āyah
says. So now let’s explore what it’s saying at a bit of a deeper
level 
in shā
’
 Allāh
.
First and foremost I want to tell you that the 
āyah
right before it talks about
us not making fun of other people—
la yaskhar qawmun min qawm
—it’s not
okay for you and me to make fun of people, for one group to make fun of
another group. If you notice, for instance, the popular comedy industry—stand-
up comedians, cartoons that are comical in nature or comedy shows— they’ll try
to make fun of a particular ethnicity, they’ll stereotype something that’s funny
about the Arab, or they’ll stereotype something that’s funny about the Mexican,
or the black guy, or the white guy, or the Asian guy, or the Indian guy. They’ll
mock the way they speak or they’ll mock the way they dress or the way they eat
and everybody gets a laugh out of it. Well this is the 
āyah
that says that brand of
comedy is no good—
la yaskhar qawmun min qawm
—you shouldn’t do this.
It is not something that breeds respect for other people in a culture. It
actually breeds this idea of intolerance and looking at other people as something
to laugh at or something beneath you, and seeing yourself as superior. However
that’s not my topic here; the topic is the one about assumptions but I am telling
you that assumptions come as a result of that kind of comedy. Once it starts:
‘I’m just making a joke... I’m just saying... I’m just kidding’; and you do enough
of that, it starts sinking into your head that those people are actually like that. So
it starts off as jokes but eventually it just becomes a conviction. You are
convinced that those people, that you’ve been making fun of for so long, are
exactly the way the jokes say they are. And by the way, this is not just about
ethnicities it is also about religions, it’s also about people of different faiths, for
example Indo-Paks love making fun of Hindus and Sikhs. That is unacceptable.
It’s national too, Bangladeshis can have Pakistani jokes and Pakistanis can have
Bangladeshi jokes, and it’s funny, it’s funny to them. But you know what? You
think it’s just a joke but eventually it becomes a stereotype, a kind of bigotry
that’s accepted in a society.
It just becomes acceptable to them and they end up violating every time they
make a joke like that, they reinforce that stereotype. So when they look at a
person from a different ethnicity and even the thought crosses their mind—a
judgement passes in their head—even that becomes an evil thing to do. This is
what is remarkable about this 
āyah
: you don’t normally find in the Qur’an us
being reprimanded for thinking. You may have learned before that actions we
will be answerable for; if you thought about something—some bad thought that
came into your head but you didn’t act on it—it was just a thought that came in

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your head, then you’re still okay!
But you know what? There are a few exceptions to that, for example,
intentions are a thought and even though your action may be good if your
intention is corrupt, that thought can dictate how that action counts. Another
remarkable and unique exception to that is this