WRONG GENERALIZATION
Giving Short Measure
SOME years ago, I was travelling by a plane. The service was excellent, but I had one ‘complaint’. I was served food, but there was no toothpick along with the meal. I requested two members of the flight staff for a toothpick, but they perhaps forgot, and so I didn’t get one.
After this, for a while I thought, “This airline company is really bad. They don’t even stock toothpicks for their passengers!” But at once I felt that to think so would be against justice. There were 99 things that were available on the flight that were excellent, and there was just this one thing that was not in accordance with what I wanted. Given this, it would be very wrong if I took this one little lack and declare that the service of the airlines as a whole was awful. That would be wrong generalization. Declaring the entire airline company as awful would be a great injustice.
To obsess about one bad quality of a person and forget completely their 99 other good qualities is wrong.To exaggerate something or to underplay it are both wrong.
The Quran refers to this as ‘giving short measure’ (83: 1).
Generally speaking, when people comment on others, they commit grave injustice. They take one minor complaint that they have about them and make a huge generalization. If they are pleased with somebody, they focus on one good quality of his and ignore his 99 bad qualities. And if they are upset with him, they obsess about one bad quality of his and forget completely about his 99 good qualities. This way of thinking is inhuman, and Islam being a religion of nature abhors everything that is inhuman. This is not the way God wants us to think.
The right approach in this matter is that when we describe something, we should do so, just as it is. To exaggerate something or to underplay it are both wrong. And they are both very harmful as far as our own character-building is concerned.