Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

astagfiru-Llāh al-ʿaẓīm
!’ ‘This guy’s wearing trousers—dressing like the
kuffār
! What’s wrong with this guy?’ You look at someone and you size them
up. You didn’t make any judgements, yet as time progresses you become

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absolutely convinced and confident that they’re all like this. 
‘
All the Africans are
like that; all the Senegalese are like that; all the Nigerians are like that; all the
Bangladeshis are like that; all the Turks are like that; man I know them all, you
don’t know those guys. I know.’ That’s 
ẓann
. You’re so completely convinced.
You’re so completely set in your assumptions.
Allah (
ʿazza wa-jall
) says 
ijtanibū kathīran min al-ẓann
, it’s not even about
other ethnicities. Even inside our own homes. The wife says something to you
and you assume she means something bad. The husband says something to the
wife and she assumes he’s trying to make fun of her. ‘Dinners really good
today’, the husband says. ‘Oh you hate it again, huh? I know what you really
mean.’ ‘No no, I meant it’s good.’ ‘No, I know what you really mean, I know
you.’ That’s 
ẓann
. You’re not telepathic; you don’t know what the other person
means. Learn to give the benefit of the doubt. 
Ẓann
can become so bad in some
people that two people are walking by each other one of them says, 
al-salām
ʿalaykum wa-raḥmat Allāh wa-barakātuh
, the other in an angry mumble says,
‘Wa-ʿalaykum al-salām
’. ‘I know what he meant by “
al-salām ʿalaykum
”. He
wanted to see if I would say “
Wa-ʿalaykum al-salām
” because he wants to feel
like he’s better than me’. Or someone might say: ‘Why’d he say it like that?’
‘What do you mean? He just said 
salām
.’ ‘Yeah, but he said it a certain way…he
looked at me a certain way. I know what he was doing.’
There are some of you reading this; I’m not talking about you, I’m really not.
But some of you will say to yourselves, ‘Is he writing about me?’ ‘Did
somebody tell him about me?’ I’ve given a 
khuṭbah
before on a similar topic, it
was about speaking nicely: 
wa-qūlū li-l-nās husnā
(
al-Baqarah
2: 83). The entire
khuṭbah
was about speaking nicely because we really need it. We don’t need the
whole 
āyah
just yet. Let’s just start with that because we’re pretty bad at that,
you know. So I gave that 
khuṭbah
, and part of it was about not making
assumptions, and to just be nice to people when you speak to them. A brother
comes up to me afterwards and says, ‘Who paid you to give this 
khuṭbah
?’ ‘Did
he tell you about me?’ My goodness! You know, this is 
ẓann
.
You cannot assume that somebody doesn’t mean good for you. If someone is
proposing something to you or giving you some advice, you cannot assume it’s
to one up you, to crush your pride or to humiliate you. It may be that they
actually mean well for you. If 
ẓann
takes over then we are no longer able to give
each other good advice any more. I can’t come to you as a brother and say,
‘Look, I am concerned about this one thing’ because you’re going to have too
much of an assumption against me, and you won’t be able to take my advice.

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You’re going to think I have some other agenda.
This 
ẓann
isn’t just in our interactions within our families or within our
community this happens between us and the 
duʿāt
and ulama of Islam.
Somebody says, ‘Man, don’t listen to that guy, that one time he said one thing
and that means he must be evil, he’s got an agenda’. Look, our ulama are not
prophets, our