I had an interesting conversation with my imam today.

Brother, if you've followed the brother ever since he joined, you'd know he's never been fully comfortable and fully accepting of the theology. He accepted A version of Islam that you find more common on tumbler and in specific groups. Ever since he's been on reddit he's had a difficult time accepting the main stream understandings because those understandings weren't told to him by those who tried to make Islam appealing to the young liberal crowd.

We're all trying our best to be true Muslims but that means different things even within the Sunni circles. Let's not use words like true Muslim, rather use words that offer a degree of clarity like, main stream Islam. The brother never accepted main stream Islam. His conversion seemed like a result of misinformation.

Please try to remember, the purpose of communication. Which is to have people interact with each other, another purpose is to influence the listener. We all do this in different ways, we give facts and studies and verses from the Qur'an to influence each others into accepting our understandings.

Part of communication is speech and, who says it, how he says it and what is said are how speech is judged on how influential it can be.

As Muslims we want to try to wake others up from the heedlessness, while also working on ourselves. It's the example of being in an ocean with the rest of humanity and we are all drowning in our slumber, those who wake up 1st have to learn to stay afloat, so they can survive, then start waking others up, while we are engaged in waking others up in order to keep them from drowning we are also engaged in keeping ourselves afloat.

I tell you this because, you're a brother and I only wish to help you see that sternness is required at times and putting aside personal emotions to sincerely help others who are unaware or in a state between awareness and heedlessness. This is where your speech is important. Who you are, how you say things and what you say is, how you and I talk to people to further dialogue and influence them.

The way you are approaching this is not the best.

/r/islam Thread Parent