Islamic critical thinking: the precision of judgment

You know, the used to have to answer questions like, if a man has sexual intercourse with an animal, does that invalidate his Hajj? You know, that doesn't mean that something like that ever actually happened, but they used to engage in hypothetical questions. And they used to try to address through fit every possible scenario that could possibly be imagined. And through this process they refined their fit, and almost more importantly they refined a type of thinking, the type of thinking that is required to be a fati. To a certain extent this requires a degree of compartmentalization, that skill, of taking a part of scenario and putting each component part of that scenario in its proper place, and weighing each component part of that scenario on its own, and then determining how each part of that scenario may impact the other parts, how they may be connected, and if those connections then impact or change the what you could call the weight of each component.

I mean it sounds very complicated and I suppose it is, and to a great extent you have to actually be able to do this, to have this skill just in order to be able to understand the ruling that has been given by the For instance, if they were to say that the Hajj of someone who commits this kind of heinous act, that his Hajj is still valid, That's not the Fokkerha condoning the heinous act, but a simple minded person might interpret it as such. They might understand it that way, but that's not what the Fokkerha is saying at all. So you not only have to have this certain type of mind in order to make rulings in you have to have a certain kind of mind to even be able to properly understand the rulings that have been made. And this is something that's beyond simply being educated in ficht. This is a type of thinking.

It's an approach to thinking. It's an approach to information. It's an organized and disciplined thinking process that can draw clear lines around what is relevant to separate it from what is irrelevant. You know, meaning what's relevant or irrelevant in any given situation while understanding that this relevance or irrelevance is entirely contextual. It's the ability to separate out and parcel information.

This is an invaluable thinking skill to have, just in life in general, not just in fiqh, but has become quite rare unfortunately. But there was a time when no one in the world was more skillful and more disciplined in their approach to thinking than the Muslims. But now today, you may even fail to gain these skills even if you study fiqh because you might end up studying fiqh just by learning the rulings by rote and you never explore the methods of thinking that drove those rulings, that enabled the fulcahat to reach those rulings. And propaganda and indoctrination work best on people who lack these skills Because the best propaganda uses factual information, it's not lies. The best propaganda uses true facts, but relies on the audience's lack of critical thinking to make them believe dishonest interpretations of those facts.

You can put it that way, distortions and so on. It relies on people conflating these facts with other things. Conflating that information with other things, jumping to conclusions, and it relies on them not looking for more information. So it's not always just about fact checking as they say, but about contextualizing and dissecting information, and collecting more information so that you can have a more full picture. And propaganda and indoctrination rely on you not doing that and not having those skills.

You know, I always think about the ayah in Surat Al Zazila, when Allah says that an atom's weight of good will be seen and an atom's weight of evil will be seen. The precision of that, and the weighing of every minute thing, which then will all be estimated in the final judgment. You have to be detailed, and you have to be as comprehensive as possible in order for an overall judgment to be fair, while also making judgments, specific judgments on smaller matters, on individual matters. So the overall judgment is a tally of all those smaller judgments. You can't make a judgment about one thing and inflate it into an overall judgment.

And I'm saying judgment here but it applies to your opinion as well or should because that's all an opinion is, it's a judgment or should be. Not just an emotional reaction, but an intellectual conclusion that you have reached or that is based on the sort of process of evaluation that I'm talking about. That's what an opinion should be.