There is a moment in the fifth verse of Surah Al-Jinn that quietly describes how most of us relate to authority and it is uncomfortable to sit with.
The jinn admit something about their past. They say they always assumed no human and no jinn would ever say something false about Allah. Think about why they trusted so completely. The trader is good at trade, the builder is good at building, so the religious leader must be the expert in God. These were the holiest figures they had, people who had given their whole lives to the temple, so surely they would never get Him wrong. The jinn handed the entire question of truth over to them and stopped thinking about it themselves.
Then a little Quran reached them and they called those same revered teachers fools. The word matters. They called them foolish rather than evil. A fool, in the sense the verse uses, is someone light and empty in their thinking. The leaders were often speaking in good faith. They had stopped examining what they taught and they passed on ideas about Allah they had never really tested. Saying something false out of ignorance is still saying something false.
The warning underneath this is sharp. There is one part of your life you can never fully outsource and that is your conviction about what is true. Extending someone automatic benefit of the doubt, assuming they could never be wrong about God, is itself the trap.
There is a second lesson sitting right beside it and it may be the most useful thing you take from this verse. When someone is wrong, aim at the idea and leave the person standing. The idea can be challenged while the human stays intact. Blind loyalty and blind hatred turn out to be the same disease, because both let you skip the actual work of thinking. Every single person will be wrong about something eventually. The mature response is to correct the idea, keep the person and refuse to either worship them or discard them.
This is from Deeper Look: Surah Al-Jinn with Ustadh Nouman Ali Khan. Follow along at https://byna.tv/378
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