The Perils of a Biased Conjecture

Your presumptions could blind you.

The following is a transcript of an impromptu speech by Younus AlGohar on Snapchat during his tour of Canada and Mexico. Follow him using this Snapcode or search for @repimgs.

There is a thing called conjecture in English. We call this Ghuman in Urdu and Zan in Arabic. Both types of conjectures - good and bad - are dangerous at times.

For certain people, we develop a bad conjecture. What happens when we develop a bad conjecture about somebody is that even when they do good things, we ignore it. We can’t see it. On the other hand, for those whom we develop a good conjecture, when they do bad things, we fail to see how ugly they are sometimes.

So any type — good or bad conjecture — can be dangerous at times. You need transparency in conjecture.

Somebody asked me a question about [someone I don’t know]. I cannot comment on him because I have never heard of him. It would be really uncivilised of me to open my mouth about somebody whom I know nothing of.

We should keep our minds clear. Rather than spreading news which could be either true or false, [we] should keep ourselves out of the dirt.