Protips Collected

The #protip series includes recommendations and reminders.

• Train yourself to generate pro- & counter- scenarios—a major fiqh need is matching masa’il & ‘ilal to the contemporary context.
• For every x, adjust x to suit Islam, not Islam to suit x.
• Beware of sloppily switching topics while using a term: “sunnah” changes meaning in usul al-fiqh, mustalah al-hadith, and fiqh.
  
• When it comes to yourself: focus too much on results & you’ll get depressed, focus too much on efforts & you’ll stay the same. Balance.
• When it comes to the self-improvement of others, make sure you encourage efforts and not just results.
• Never claim “Islam says” based solely upon a ruling within a single school of fiqh.
• Reserve “Islam says” for matters of consensus; never use it if there are legitimate differences of opinion on an issue.
• Avoid studying from someone who does not or cannot differentiate between the school’s mu‘tamad and the [overruled] preferences of individual scholars nor contemporary “corrections” that deviate from the school’s usul.
• Muslim activism is descriptive; Islamic activism is normative. No Islamic activism w/o Islamic norms, goals, gaps & means.
• When reading Quran on electronic devices, make sure you turn off wifi to avoid being distracted by email and social media
• Famous Fulan praying according to x probably says more about his parents’ practice than it does his learned legal preferences.
• A claim today that madhhab x is superior tends to indicate being too ill-informed to be following anything else.
• Have a thick hide and ignore what silly people say.
• When initiating criticism, make sure that you do not contribute to the existing problem or, through your criticism, create it.
• Remember to employ the principle of charity, especially when reading things online.
• Quit assuming that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a compressed version of Islam & their #maqasid are identical.
• Definitions are domain dependent. Something can be a non-sunnah with respect to hadtih yet still a sunnah with respect to fiqh
• For dā‘īs: If you’re having trouble getting people to believe, it’s you who needs the changing, not Islam.