Ep. 38: How Rules Work | Best Conduct

We learned about how Musa (AS) approached his teacher and how his teacher laid down strict conditions. Whenever strict conditions are laid down, it is not for the sake of disturbing or restricting the student, but it is always to achieve something especially important. Let us think of another scenario where there are two friends. One friend says, “I will choose to talk to you however I feel like it. If I want to make fun of you, I will make fun of you, and if I feel like swearing at you, I will swear at you. If you have something that I want, I will take it from you without asking, and whenever it is time for us to do an activity, I will always be the one who decides.” The other friend will say, “What are you talking about? This is not how friendships work. You have to respect me. You do not have the right to take away whatever I have. You don’t always get to decide.” The first friend says, “What kind of friend are you? Why can’t you accept me like I am?” The second friend will say, “Maybe this is how you like to behave, but this is not how you treat people. We cannot be friends.” In this case, who was right and who was wrong? Was the first or second person, right? Most people would say the second person. Was he not just being strict on his friend and trying to limit his life? Was he being judgemental about his friend? No, he just wanted to be treated with respect. This is a basic condition of being friends with anyone. Let us discuss another example.

A person goes to the hospital to visit someone who is sick, and with them, they bring in speakers attached to their iPad. These speakers are blasting music, and this person walks into the hospital and says, “I am here to see so-and-so who is in such-and-such room and such-and-such ward.” The person who is at the reception will say, “We will talk about this later. You have to turn your music off. We cannot let you take that inside.” He will say, “It’s my music. I can listen to whatever I want. Your job is to treat people who are sick. It is none of your business what I am doing.” They are trying to explain to this person that they cannot bring noise into this environment as people are sick and they have the right to be at peace. The sick people cannot heal, and the nurses can’t do their work if there is noise . He can say to them, “You’re just judging me. You don’t like me because of the color of my skin or because of the music I am listening to.” He can say that all he wants, but the fact is, he was not meeting the basic expectations for visiting someone. Everything in life has a bare-minimum standard. If you are not meeting it, you are not ready for that thing. For example, if someone were to enter a school with guns and say, “I am just a hunter who practices shooting targets in my free time. Please do not mind the guns. I’ll be careful.” I don’t think any one of us will allow a person like that to walk around our schoolyards. Even though he might say, “I know what I’m doing, why are you interfering with my hobby?” You and others will say, “This is not the place for a thing like this. You are not meeting the basic safety requirements of a school.”

These types of rules are not to restrict people or make life miserable, but to make sure things always run smoothly, and regardless of the setting we are going into, whether it is a classroom, our home, a hospital or anywhere else – all these places have rules. Rules are not about telling people, “Don’t do this.” Rules guide us to what we need to be doing at a given time. That guy who brought his speaker into the hospital? The idea was not to stop him from coming, but rather, it was to let him know to be respectful to the environment he was in. That second friend? He was not trying to be harsh to the other friend, but instead, he wanted to be respected and treated fairly. Rules are about guiding us towards what we need to be doing. The problem is, we look at them as limitations and restrictions. No one likes to be restricted. The problem is not with the rules – it is the way we precieve them. We are looking at them as something that stops us rather than something that will help us in another environment, whether it means in a classroom or in a musallah. For every setting, there is a set of norms and rules, and they are simply there to help us get accomplish our goals or tasks.. Think about this the next time someone tells you that you cannot do something. It is not about limiting you; it is about helping you understand what needs to be done in a certain place. May Allah (SWT) give us the