Tom Facchine – Minute with a Muslim #035 – A Message To Teachers & Da’ees on Social Media

			When it comes to teaching people, you have to use discretion, discretion is extremely important. And
it and it's become harder because now we have mass media platforms like YouTube and Facebook and
Instagram, where you can't control who's watching your stuff, we call this context collapse, right?
So the way that you would give a lecture at a university, which should be different from the way
that you conduct a class on a machine, which should be different from a video for YouTube, or video
for Facebook, and especially shorter sort of formats, but a lot of people this is this is lost on
them. And so it actually ends up in real problems, we have it as part of our tradition, you know,
		

			speak to the people according to their levels, do you want them to reject a lot as messenger, you
have to be very discreet, I will hold on some of the other companions, they said, you know, we
memorize so many Hadith and I reported these. And there's a whole other sort of group of Hadith that
I didn't report, right. And the ethos behind this was the reasoning behind this is that not all
information is good in everybody's hands, right? For some people who have certain information falls
into their hands, it's going to actually be a liability for them, it's going to be damaging to them
individually, and the entire community as a whole. So you have to be discreet, you have to
		

			understand that not everybody needs to know everything, he should tell people what they need to
know, right, that's that sort of moral dimension of discretion that comes into our speech.
Unfortunately, some teachers they get in front of a camera, or they get up on the table or at a
machine and they just rattle off everything that they know about a subject, there are certain
discussions that should be only behind closed doors, especially when it comes to introducing doubts,
right or fringe opinions, or something that you maybe doubt that's like very sort of against the
grain, maybe you can handle it, because you're an academic, maybe you can handle it, because you're
		

			a specialist. But if you're going to air it in front of a general audience, you're really affecting
their faith, and you're doing damage that that you don't see. So it's extremely important for
teachers to keep this in mind. And when it comes to relating to people to be able to use familiar
concepts and familiar language, this is a fatal flaw of the Western academy or of academia is that
they invent their own jargon that actually excludes the people from understanding, you know, what if
you read Foucault, if you read any of the sort of, you know, philosophy texts or things like that,
we're dropping Latin phrases, we're dropping French phrases, we're dropping all these sorts of
		

			terminologies. Right? Okay. If you study, you can understand them. But this is language that's meant
to exclude it's not language that is just efficient, right? It's language that's meant to
deliberately exclude people from understanding. And that's not moral. Right? That actually it has an
unethical dimension to it. When you're a teacher and the Islamic tradition. Yes, there's something
about being articulate. But there's a different thing of being, you know, obtuse. being obtuse is
something entirely different. You need to consider your audience, you need to speak to them in a way
that they're going to understand that's going to be clear, right? It's not going to be easily
		

			misunderstood. And you're going to have to make it make sense to them. It's the teacher's
responsibility to make it make sense and use techniques that are going to be able to hit home with
whatever your audience is and not put them out of their depth. And there's a dimension that's why
because Allah Spano Dada prevents somebody from understanding certain things, right? So
understanding has to do with guidance from Allah Spano. Dada, right you have to have a good
intention. A loss bound data will give you understanding, so you have to purify yourself, this
purification is part of teaching, right? Just as it is part of learning. You can't go in to
		

			something trying to learn it with a bad intention with for your ego. You also can't go into teaching
with your ego and without sort of purifying yourself to so as a teacher, you have to purify your
attentions and try to keep that audience in mind, be discreet and ask Allah subhanaw taala to give
your students understanding