Critical thinking: Weighing Information Properly

But like if someone wears the if some if if a woman wears niqab, for example, people assume that she's just pious in every way. That she must be pious in every way. She can have no bad qualities, she can have no failings, she can have no weaknesses, she can have no sins. And if she has any of those things, then her wearing the niqab is some kind of nifak, You know? But if she or or or even doesn't have to be the niqab, the hijab.

I don't make any conclusion about a woman who wears the hijab except that she's wearing hijab. That's all I know. That's the only thing that I can draw. That's the only conclusion I can draw. That's one obligation in Islam that I know that this sister is following.

That's all I know. It doesn't tell me anything else about her, about her moral qualities, about her goodness, or her wickedness, or her anything else. It doesn't tell me anything about her righteousness except this is one obligation that she's fulfilling. That's all. But people conflate, you know.

Or like if you see a man with a big beard, you think oh, he's a sheikh. He's a he's a he must be a very righteous man. No. He's just a guy with a beard. That's all.

That's one that's one thing that he is fulfilling, you know. And sometimes they'll be fulfilling it specifically as a way to hide something else, as we know. When Omar bin Al Khattab was wanting to appoint someone to a position and someone recommended another man to Omar and he said, okay, I mean, do you know that he's good? And he said, yeah, he's he's good. I recommend him.

He's good. And he said, maybe what you mean by him being good is that you see him in the masjid, and he comes for salah. And he said, this doesn't tell me anything about whether he's good or not, or whether he's whether he can do this job, or whether he's trustworthy or not. All you know all you're telling me is that you see him pray, which only tells me that he's someone who prays. That's all it tells me.

It doesn't tell me more than that. It doesn't tell me that he's not a liar, it doesn't tell me that he's not a thief, it doesn't tell me that he's trustworthy, it tells me that he prays, that's all. It tells me nothing else. So you have to you have to keep everything within its proportion, that's what that's why, you know, like the ayah, an atom's weight worth of good and an atom's weight worth of evil. Everything in its proportion is measured according to what it actually is, what the action actually is.

And it doesn't you don't conflate it with anything else, you don't inflate it into something more than it is, and you don't decrease it into less than it is. But people do this all the time. Yeah. It's like it's it's a generalization and a conflation of one thing to mean another. You're you're jumping to a conclusion that's not actually obvious.

You're thinking that something means more than what it means. You think it means more than what it means. You think if a woman wears hijab, it means that she's righteous in every way, that she's a saint. No. It it means she's wearing hijab.

She has a cloth on her head. That's all it means. She's doing one thing that Allah told her to do. I don't know if she's doing anything else. And it's the same with like like with what Omar said.

And he said, like, you have to actually spend time with someone. And have you seen him in all different circumstances and situations? Then you will know more about someone. So I mean part of so part of part of that is in critical thinking then, is knowing that the info knowing the the actual how can I say this? What whatever information that you're looking at, knowing the limits of what it's telling you.

Knowing the limits of what that information is actually conveying, so that you're not thinking that it's telling you more than it actually is. If a man is is praying in the masjid, it only tells you that this man prays in the masjid. That's all it tells you. It doesn't tell you anything else about him. I mean, and see, I mean, then it get okay.

You can get into what what where the subjectivities would of that would be, which is that according to the the various subjectivities, your life experience, your upbringing, your indoctrination, your background, and so on, you're interpreting the information through that and then making conclusions that are beyond what the information is actually telling you. You're because you're interpreting it through your own experience and and subjectivities. So you're not restricting the relevance of the information to what is actually contained in the information.