Minute with a Muslim #270 – Maybe They Repented Already

People change. I think that's one thing that we forget a lot, especially in the in the age of YouTube and Facebook and all these sorts of things where if you say something from 2015 and 2010, now it's recorded. Now it's going around. Now it's out there, right? And so maybe you see a video and you're like, Oh my God, how could they say such a thing that's so problematic, and that person might have changed, and you don't even know it. And you might be kind of on some sort of canceled culture crusade against somebody for something that they've done in the past. And maybe it's something that they've already repented from. It's very possible. Now, what does it look like to

repent? Sometimes, what are our expectations? Sometimes we want the person that grovel, whiten, you know, rub their faces in the mud and do this huge public kind of retraction and say, I was wrong about this. And I was so misguided. And so but man, I really would implore people to just treat other people the way that they would like to be treated on these sorts of things. Think about yourself in that situation, think about how hard it is on the neffs for someone to admit that they're wrong period to themselves. And then to come out with a sort of groveling public public retraction about sorts of things. You can say, Okay, well, they did a public harm. And they said

this thing in public and so everything should be in public. Yeah. And you might be right. I don't know, maybe you are, right. But I know for a fact that you wouldn't like to be treated that way. And I know for a fact that I wouldn't like to be treated that way. You know, I'm a Shafi has written poetry about this. And this is well known. And, honestly, this is the son of the Prophet alayhi salatu salam, when it comes to when people would do stuff, he would get up on them and walk. And he would say, my Bella Coleman fit together, okay, they're like, what's wrong with a group of people that do this and do that there's a reason he didn't name people, because the objective is sort of

the objective is somebody returning to the right path. And that's a mark of sincerity for somebody that wants to maximize the likelihood that somebody else is going to return to the right path and to do whatever is reasonable to ease that person's return to the right path. And sometimes we employ strategies that are the opposite. Sometimes we employ strategies that make it difficult for people to return to the right path. And I'm sure throughout Muslim history in the history of Islamic scholarship, you can find scholars yes, that were extremely stern and extremely even, like put people on blast about this issue and that issue, but at the end of the day, we have to be concerned

that we're being affected by a non Islamic ethic here. We have to be concerned that we're being affected by canceled culture, we have to be concerned that we're being affected by sort of the shrieking, shrill politics of what we see today. People attacking each other on social media and things like that. How do we know how do we know that our manner of dealing with other people when they make horrible mistakes is really coming from our Islamic tradition. It's not coming from somewhere else.