Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

āyah
—
ijtanibū kathīran min al-
ẓann
— Allah says stay, as much as possible, away from this concept of 
ẓann
,
which I am translating as ‘making assumptions’. But the idea of making
assumptions is just something that is going on in your head, you didn’t say
anything, you didn’t do anything and even that Allah is saying: don’t even think
like that. That’s a very strange thing about this 
āyah
, in that the previous 
āyah
said don’t make fun of people, that’s understandable, that’s actually saying
something, doing something, it’s an action. Later on in this 
āyah
, it says: don’t
spy on people, don’t backbite people, right? All of these are actions that people
do. They spy against one another, they try to dig up dirt against one another
—‘don’t do that stuff’—fine; but here we’re being taught to change the way we
think and this is critical.
We’re learning something very powerful about this process. If you don’t
change the way people think, if you don’t change the way you and I think, then
things are not going to get better; things are going to get worse. Actually the
crimes that Allah mentions after that: 
ghībah
(backbiting) that you’ve heard
many times about, spying on one another, not trusting each other; all of that
actually begins with a certain kind of thinking. And Allah says stay, as much as
possible, away from that kind of thinking. So let’s begin looking into that a little
now, 
in shā
’
 Allāh
.
Let’s take the word 
ijtināb
first. 
Ijtināb
originally comes from the word 
janb
in Arabic which means the ‘side’ of something. So when people lie down on
their sides—
wa-ʿalā junūbihim
(
Āl ʿImrān
3: 191)—they are lying on their sides.
When you are travelling on a plane, or you’re sitting on a subway, or you’re
sitting on a bus and there is a ‘person next to you’, this is: 
al-ṣāḥib bi-l-janb
(
al-
Nisā’
4: 36). When you’re sitting in a waiting room in a hotel, or a hospital, or a
doctor’s office, and there is a ‘person sitting next to you’, this is 
al-ṣāḥib bi-l-
janb
, because they are sitting right by your ‘side’.
Now from it comes an interesting verb 
al-ijtināb
which means ‘to avoid
something that is right next to you’. It literally means ‘avoidance’ but how does
it mean avoidance? It’s not just to avoid something that’s far away, but it’s
rather something that’s actually right next to you. You are in danger of being
contaminated by it, so you have to go out of your way to get away from it. What

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we’re learning then is the idea that making assumptions about people is
inevitable. It’s always there, it’s always right next to you it’s not something you
say, ‘Well, I don’t judge people man, I don’t judge people. I’m not like that’.
Actually it’s always there. The 
iftiʿāl
(
ijtināb
) form in the Arabic language
suggests you have to make an effort to do something, it doesn’t come naturally.
It’s not something you do without even thinking about it. It takes effort.
So it doesn’t matter that you haven’t done it before, you still have to make an
effort not to do it now. It’s not something that becomes passive, it’s not like
breathing. So 
ijtanibū
means whatever Allah is telling us to stay away from, we
must have an active mind, we have to be vigilant and realize that we are always
going to be in danger of making that mistake. Nobody can assume that they’re
righteous and pure enough that they won’t fall into this mistake. Had this not
been a danger Allah (