In the heart of every Muslim, arrogance is supposed to be Public Enemy No. 1. We all learnt this since we were kids: “No one will enter Paradise in whose heart is an atom’s weight of arrogance”, as said by our Prophet ﷺ.
The believer must never think highly of himself. He must at all times see himself as below others, and never above. This is the essence of humility, at least for us. To falter here is to open the gates for evil in your heart. Arrogance is to ʾīmān (belief) what acid is to base; they neutralize each other until there’s nothing of belief and sincerity left, leaving you a defenseless thrall to Shaiṭān.
The Dilemma
But ever since I was giving class presentations in public school, I wrestled with a seeming contradiction in my brain between humility and public speaking that I couldn’t figure out.
On the one hand, you’re not to allow yourself the least bit of arrogance. You’re nothing. You’re not higher in status than anyone else. You’re not distinguished from anyone else. Actually, you’re kind of pathetic - and if only you’d realize that once in a while, you wouldn’t be blind to all the different ways everyone else was so much better than you. It’s only by the mercy of Allah that you still have a chance to fix yourself and become good in His eyes. This is the mentality of the Muslim, regardless of his material position in society - a shocking contrast to all of the self-praise that is encouraged in our modern capitalist culture. The Muslim instead seeks reassurance only in Allah, not in himself.
On the other hand, You are called up to the podium to stand over everyone else. You are meant to speak while everyone listens to what you have to say. But if you’re not above anyone else, then why are You the one standing at the podium while everyone else is sitting? If you’re not distinguished, then what distinguishes You to speak while everyone else has to listen?
There was always something I couldn’t quite resolve between these two perceived realities. Let’s try to analyze this.
“Sell your Soul” vs. "Apologize”
This social situation - the one of the “speaker” and the “audience” - imposes an obvious hierarchy which seems to contradict the Muslim’s beliefs about their status relative to others. There exists a clear and undeniable status differential between the speaker and the listener, between the teacher and the student. This creates cognitive dissonance - the stress that results from a perceived contradiction between someone’s beliefs and their actions. Cognitive dissonance theory says that your mind will do everything in its power to change either your beliefs or actions until there’s no more contradiction.
So how does that work out in practice? From what I’ve seen, there are two shallow ways most people use to resolve this cognitive dissonance - “sell your soul” or “apologize”.
“Sell your soul” is when you conform your beliefs to the apparent situation in order to resolve the contradiction — in other words, you become arrogant. I should be the one speaking because these people need to hear what I have to say. I’m the main character. I’m so amazing— it makes perfect sense that I’m up here and they’re down there! This mindset creates excellent speakers. These speakers are charismatic, confident, larger-than-life, and most of all, self-assured. There is no discomfort between them and the podium — to them, being the speaker is the natural order of things. They have internalized their role at the top of the hierarchy induced by the situation. And it turned them into stuck-up snobs.
I’ve seen it confirmed through experience. My favourite teachers and speakers throughout my life have almost always tended to be full of themselves off the podium. My classmates who delivered the best presentations were also the most arrogant, including myself. The best presenters in society, actors, are known to be some of the most arrogant in society. I almost always saw a connection between arrogance and the most fiery & passionate speakers — the only time I didn’t was (unsurprisingly) with Muslim speakers.
But if you’re not keen on selling your soul, the other natural resolution is “apologize” — you keep your heart safe, but your actions conform. The result is a speech given by someone who clearly doesn’t think they should be doing so. In western culture, they would describe this as “not believing in yourself”. Everything they do seems like they’re unconsciously apologizing to the audience for their position in the hierarchy, which is why I gave it this name. If their actions could speak, it would sound like: “Sorry sorry sorry, I know I’m not supposed to be up here. Please, forgive me for why it has to be this way. Ugh! I’m nothing, who am I to teach you anything!”. Their discomfort with their role at the top of the hierarchy is continuously projected to the listener.
These are the schoolchildren who hide their face from the teacher when she’s picking the next student to present. They’ll make every attempt to get out of speaking, before somberly and reluctantly dragging themselves to the front of the class. These speakers have low volume (because to speak loudly would mean people should listen to them, which they definitely shouldn’t!). They struggle with eye-contact. The ends of their sentences either trail off, so as to say “none of this is important anyway”, or have that characteristic upward inflection that screams “I’m not an authority!”. Any bit of confidence they show appears forced. Above all, they just want to autopilot through it just to get back with the audience.
It’s important to note that “sell your soul” and “apologize” are usually not conscious decisions. These are simply the natural ways people sort themselves when going up to speak. The same person can alternate between the two depending on the situation; for example, one might sell their soul when speaking to their remedial math class, and apologize when speaking to their advanced English class. Cognitive dissonance takes the path of least resistance; if it’s easier to conform your beliefs (“sell your soul”), that’s how your mind will unconsciously resolve the contradiction. If it’s easier to conform your actions (“apologize”), that’s what you’ll do.
Fixing the Mindset
Both of these methods suck: one of them makes you a terrible presenter, and the other, well, is selling your soul. Is there any better way to resolve this contradiction? Preferably in a way that will enable us to be a great presenter without diseasing our heart? That’s what I thought about for a long time, and I’ll now share the different ways I tried to answer this question for myself.
Attempt #1: Feigning Arrogance
To me at least, it seemed impossible to decouple arrogance from qualities that made a great speaker. There was something principally self-important about speaking in front of an audience that couldn’t be handwaved. So I thought, why not simply play a character? When I go to speak, I could “feign” arrogance, i.e. temporarily inject that mentality that is conducive to powerful speaking. Then I could be my normal self everywhere else, so long as I did this all very carefully.
I believed this for a while, and it gave me sure results. But with time, the line between this and actual arrogance seemed uncomfortably faint to me. Moreover, who’s to say I’m excused for even feeling this way temporarily? What if the angel of death took me in such a state? The more I learned about the dangers of arrogance, the more this method felt icky to me.
Attempt #2: The Defendant
The defendant, accused of a crime, is the lowest person in a courtroom. Even when he’s speaking on the stand, everyone listening in the audience is higher in status. What if you imagined the classroom was a courtroom, you were the defendant, the audience was the jury, and your talk is your impassioned defense?
You can come up with other kinds of examples of this — for instance, you can imagine you’re the interviewee for a job. Or imagine you’re passing a speaking certification, and you’re being graded on your speaking ability.
The abstraction of all these examples is to see listeners not as learners but as evaluators. A listener’s role here is not to gain something from the speaker, but to grade the speaker on how well they did. This flips the hierarchy on its head, and gives rise to a mode of speaking we can call “prove yourself” - which is neither “apologize” nor “sell your soul”.
But like “apologize”, even though your heart is kept safe, I don’t think “prove yourself” is conducive to good speaking. It’s characterized by self-consciousness, which tends to turns the speaker into a nervous mess.
Attempt #3: Externalizing - or, Separating “Driver” from “Vehicle”
Consider the jet pilot. It is correct to say that the pilot, when he’s flying the jet, is going blazingly fast. But it’s never correct to say that the pilot is himself fast. In and of himself, he’s just as humanly slow as the rest of us. In other words, we give the attribute of speed to the jet and not the pilot. Likewise strength is intrinsic to the bulldozer, and not its operator. Precision is intrinsic to the SATNAV, and not the driver. And it would become arrogance if the driver were to blur the line between him and the vehicle - to feel that he is fast, or strong, or precise, because his vehicle is. But this doesn’t happen in these cases, because the separation between driver and vehicle is clear to him.
We can view speaking in the same way. Consider if we decoupled the “teacher role” and its “driver”, the same way we decoupled drivers from vehicles in the above example. Now, we can say, status is intrinsic to the teacher role, and not whosoever happens to be filling the teacher role at that time. You no longer see yourself as the “teacher”, an individual the top of the hierarchy — instead, you create some external entity in your head called the teacher “role”, which you drive much like a pilot might fly a jet.
(I’m reminded of how in the militaries of Commonwealth countries, enlisted (non-officer) soldiers are required to salute officers — but the salute is to the commission the officers carry, and not the officers themselves.)
This is subtly but critically different from Attempt #1 (Feigning Arrogance). There’s no need to do that here, just as there’s no need for a pilot to convince himself he’s fast just because the plane itself is fast. The status belongs to the teacher role and never to you. And like you, the students are not “students”, but merely people occupying the “student role”, which is inferior to the “teacher role”. What makes a racecar driver better than the other is not that one is ‘faster’ than the other - they’re both pretty slow people themselves. Rather, one is better at maneuvering the racecar (to make it go faster) than the other.
But couldn’t one object that we’re merely pushing the problem back one step? What is it that gives you status to “drive the teacher role” over anyone else? No; this question no longer makes sense under this paradigm. Remember, the attribute of status is intrinsic to the teacher role, not the teacher, even when they’re occupying the teacher role. Even when a pilot is flying the jet at the speed of sound, he himself is still not fast. So it’s never a question of status between the individuals anymore, just the roles.
This mindset empowers the humble Muslim to go in front of the audience and deliver shock-and-awe in their speech, without having cognitive dissonance between his role and his perceived status — because it’s all being externalized onto the teacher (or speaker, or khateeb, etc) role.
I feel like this is an incredibly satisfactory resolution of the dilemma I’ve long dealt with, and it seems obvious enough now that I wonder why I didn’t see it sooner.
الحمد للّه على كل حال، واللّه أعلم