Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

ʿazza wa-jall
) could very easily have told us: 
lā taẓunnū
.
That’s a simple command (
amr
). 
Khayr al-kalām mā qall wa-dall
: the best kind
of speech is concise. ‘Don’t make assumptions’—
lā taẓunnū
. Don’t make
assumptions about each other. The language is concise. But He says: 
ijtanibū
kathīran min al-ẓann
. This is actually 
iṭālah
(long-windedness) in rhetoric.
You’ve extended the speech, you’ve said a lot more than just, ‘don’t make
assumptions’. Rather: ‘stay away from it because it’s always going to be right
next to you’.
Then He adds the word 
kathīran
(a lot/very much), which is also strange.
When 
Ibrahim
(
ʿalayhi al-salām
) makes 
duʿā’
: 
wa-jnubnī wa-baniyya an naʿbud
al-aṣnām
(
Ibrāhīm
14: 35), he doesn’t add the word 
kathīran
(a lot)—‘Prevent
me and my children from worshipping idols’.
When Allah says: 
wa-jtanib al-ṭāghūt
(
al-Naḥl
16:36), ‘avoid false gods’, He
doesn’t say 
kathīran
(a lot). He also says: 
wa-jtanib al-ṭāghūt
and not 
wa-jtanib
min
al-ṭāghūt
; whereas in the 
āyah
we’re looking at, He says 
min al-ẓann
. That’s
going even further, meaning making assumptions is so close to you, you have to
push it away from you and you have do it a lot. In other words virtually every
conversation you and I have has the possibility of our making assumptions about
someone. We’ve got to think about this a lot, we’ve got to become very
conscious of this, if we’re going to live by this. Before I discuss how we should
avoid it, let’s deal with the word 
ẓann
a little bit.
What does 
ẓann
mean and where does it come from in the Arabic language?
It’s from what’s called 
lughat al-aḍdād
: it’s from the language of opposites. In
other words it means to make assumptions about something, obviously when you
make assumptions about something you don’t know for sure. You don’t really

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know what you are talking about. But 
ẓann
also means that your assumption
grows to the point where now you are absolutely convinced of something. It
actually means both of those things. That is why in the positive sense you find it
in the Qur’an:
who realize that ultimately they will have to meet their Lord ...
(Al-Baqarah 2: 46)
They are absolutely convinced that they are going to be meeting with their
master—that’s a kind of conviction. Before 
īmān
they had an assumption: ‘Am I
going to meet Allah or not, I don’t know?’ There’s just a thought. After 
īmān
it
became firm 
ẓann
, it became conviction—
alladhīna yaẓunnūn annahum mulāqū
Rabbihim
. On the other hand there are people who say things like, ‘We are not
going to be raised after we die’:
… and it is only (the passage of) time that destroys us. Yet the fact is
that they know nothing about this and are only conjecturing.
(Al-Jāthiyah 45: 24)
They say: ‘We’re not going to be raised after we die’, and Allah says: ‘They
have no knowledge about that, they’re just making assumptions’. This verb is
like an oxymoron.
But what does it mean here? Here in particular. It means first you have an
assumption about somebody: ‘I don’t like that guy. I don’t know, the guy is kind
of…’. Somebody walks into the masjid: ‘Man, that guy didn’t even have a beard
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