Hadith Series – #14 – Assume Good of Others

The Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said eoco mabunda in Alana, Aqua will Hadith winter finale that, beware of Vaughn, which has a couple of meanings. And some of those meanings have to do with assumptions. Right or speculation, nice word.

And then he said, Because assumption and asbestos speculation is some of the falses speech, or is the false test speech.

And this is an essential skill, and practice that Muslims need to to really be attentive to because it's a real slippery slope. When you start making assumptions or speculating about other people, it really leads you to bad places very quickly. And a lot of times it has to do with not really what actually is happening in our lives, but how we are interpreting what's happening in our lives. So for example, you get home from work and your spouse is there and your spouse is kind of like,

maybe they're lost in their phone, okay. And all of a sudden, you're hurt, right? Oh, they don't care about me, they're not ready to greet me or meet me or any of these things, I feel so abandoned, I feel so alone and uncared for. Okay, that's a lot of speculation you just heaped on there, maybe the person, they are trying to help somebody else who's going through a hard time, maybe a calamity just struck, maybe their parents are sick, or somebody had something, and they need to really respond to it in a timely way. You should you should at least ask right? You should try to find out. And even if it ends up being, it's like, no, I was just looking at cat videos on Facebook, you know,

okay, then, you know, you should try to make an excuse for that person, maybe that person had a really hard day, maybe they need to decompress, maybe they need to vent right, like so we have to be careful about the way that we interpret things, the way that we interpret things often do more damage and make us more sad than what's actually going on. And the other way that this goes is prying into people's intentions or imagining that we can kind of ascertain what people are intending. This is another really bad thing that we do. So if somebody you know, does something, then your internal speech or your thought or your interpretation is, oh, they're just doing it

because they're trying to get back at me for this other thing that happened, or they're just doing it because they're trying to belittle me or they're trying to put themselves above me, etc. This is very, very dangerous. And it's very, very bad for the ego. At the end of the day, the only i Lost Found to Allah knows people's intentions. And we have to be really, really careful when it comes to judging the intentions of others. And the last thing I'll say is that we should be careful, one of the types of speculation or assumptions that we can make about other people has to do with these kinds of like, essential characteristics that we want to put on people because we tell stories in

our heads about people. And that's different from saying that you did this right, maybe you said something that hurt me. Or maybe you did something that really made things hard for me. But for me to say that you're lazy, or you are so inconsiderate, or you are this person, this is who you are, not only is it practically a very damaging thing to say to another person, because now you're kind of like putting this identity and maybe they're going to actually identify with that, and they're going to have a harder time overcoming it. But it's also, it's also just unnecessary in the sense that it makes something into it overlooks all the positive qualities about that person. Right. It

also erases all the other instances or evidence that are to the contrary of what you're saying about that person. Or saying oh, well, you're lazy or Oh, you don't care for me, or this is what you always do. You know, now you have a vested interest to not remember all the times that that person was actually, you know, really hard working or was helping you out in some way. So we need to be really careful about conjecture about assumptions about the way that we're interpreting things in the way that we're kind of cementing things, the stories that we tell about other people in our minds, because it's a very, very tricky thing to get right as the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa

sallam said, it is the most dishonest speech