al-Raghib al-Isfahani #82 – Can praising others ever have GOOD in it

We all know that praise can be a dangerous thing the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam he told us companions, while in a situation in which one of the companions praised another companion to his face, the prophesy said, I'm sad, you broke his back, right, or in another narration, if I remember correctly, you killed him. And so we know that praising someone to their face can be very, very dangerous to the neffs. And it can be very dangerous to making someone kind of egotistical or fool themselves, etc. However, I've also had, he tells us that there are exceptions to this. And there are situations in which praising somebody even to their face is something good. So one of those

situations is if you're encouraging that person or other people that are listening to good times, that means that this is judged by the outcome that is governed by muscle. So there's four things that are asked for. And he says, because he thinks very categorically, that motivate people to do good one is their intellect, right? They think they believe this thing is good, or this thing is bad, they're going to do the good thing, they're going to do the thing that they thought was good, right. The second is modesty and shame. They're afraid about what other people are going to say, or they're afraid about what other people are going to, or what Allah subhanaw taala is going to judge

them by or how last month is going to evaluate that particular action that they did. So doing something that is good might be out of the motivation of modesty and shame, modesty, and Seamus fine. It's a wonderful thing in our religion. The third thing, and this is why it's relevant to this chapter is praise and encouragement. What is one of the four things that drives people to do good praise and encouragement, especially we know young people, children, they love to be praised, they love to be encouraged. And so this can be a very powerful motivational tool. And then the final thing is reward and punishment. What motivates people to do good reward and punishment is another

thing that motivates people to do good. And so another useful I think, modern example of what we have for this is how sports coaches, the best coaches actually attempt to motivate people, they might have to deploy or employ all four of these tactics, and they know the personality of the person that they're dealing with. And, you know, it fascinates me when I read comments from NBA coaches, and they say, Well, this particular player, you know, he's really tough on himself. And so I know that I just have to build a mind on this particular player. You know, he's kind of hard headed and he likes when I challenged him directly and he likes when I call him out on his on his

stuff, and you know, call them lazy and these sorts of things. So everybody's different depending on their personality. It's not necessarily categorically good or bad to praise somebody, you have to look at the results. If it encourages them to do good then praising them is something that's good, but if it leads to pride and jealousy, then praise should be avoided.