the Practical Principles of Men

Our principles are often more aspirational than actually manifest in our behavior. That doesn't mean hypocrisy as long as we continue to believe in and affirm the correctness of those principles and values. Continuing to affirm the principles and values we believe in even as we falter in adhering to them maintains them as guides for us to judge our behavior and enables us to identify our shortcomings. This is the real importance of principles. When a principle ceases to be affirmed, its violation becomes acceptable and normal.

When someone articulates their values, you don't necessarily know if they're actually living by them. You just know that they believe those are good values and people should live by them. The best that you can really assume or expect about someone is that they are at least trying to live by the values that they articulate even while you know that everyone struggles. Most people are fortunate enough to never have their values and beliefs seriously tested. Most people who take a very rigid and judgmental stance have the privilege of living in an insulated bubble of relative comfort and safety that never requires them to make the choice between their ideals and practical survival.

People who have known deprivation, poverty, exploitation, and powerlessness tend to have a more realistic understanding of compromise and the perpetual negotiation that people have to engage in in this dunya between their ideals and putting food on the table. This is something that men, to one extent or another, have to deal with all the time as husbands, as fathers, as. Men cannot afford to be impractical idealists. They have to provide for and protect their families. That means that they have to decide on a regular basis which ideals and principles are nonnegotiable and which can be compromised without causing serious spiritual and moral deterioration.

Women are generally more in a position to indulge in idealism and to look at the world through rose tinted glasses, and this tends to make them more judgmental but less judicious. Rigidity and extremism are just noxious versions of naivete. They reveal a lack of experience and a disconnection from the real world. They are thus illustrative of a lack of masculinity. Real men with real experience will always have a tremendous capacity for forgiveness, compassion, and empathy because they know the struggle all too well.

They know the ugliness of the world and the unpleasant trade offs that are required of people trying to carve out their place in the dunya, and they often know how far they can bend only because they've been broken before. There are a whole lot of men out here that are held together by band aids and chewing gum, and a lot of what looks like muscle is nothing but scar tissue. A real man, a Raju, will always affirm his beliefs and values, but he will be moderate and balanced, not harsh and extreme. And his principles will always be practicable in the real world, which will almost always mean that he's going to incline towards leniency and tolerance while still upholding the principles in theory, but he will conserve his energy for the fights that genuinely matter which will include any time those beliefs and values are called into question as aspirational ideals, but not every time someone fails to live by them.