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