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It is very difficult to be fair. Often our own perceptions and prejudices get in the way of us being fair to others.

Yesterday, I was listening to a Muslim convert speaking about his experience moving within established British Muslim communities. Not for the first time, he described feeling like an outcast amongst those raised as Muslims.

Hearing him, I might be moved to nod my head and agree. But only based on certain experiences. It takes some humility to pause for thought, reflect and dig deeper. Or, rather, to be fair. For, in truth, that is not the totality of my experience at all.

In life, you cannot expect everyone to like you. It’s not your right to be held in esteem by all. Nor can you demand that all people, everywhere, are bound to act as role models of your religion.

What do you know of those you’re interacting with? At that moment you come into contact with another, who’s to say what their state of mind may be, or what is preoccupying them.

Perhaps your interlocutor has just had a bereavement. Perhaps they’re dealing with health or marital problems. Might they have experienced a lifetime of racism? Or could they simply be busy, in a hurry, or otherwise engaged?

To be fair means viewing everyone we interact with as individuals, operating within individual circumstances and contexts. It is also to take a balanced view of all experiences, rather than selecting those which confirm our narrative.

I could easily look back on a period of my life at university, during which I had very negative experiences interacting with some Muslims, and therefore speak negatively of all Muslims I met at university. But that was not the totality of my experience.

Just as I had conflict with some Muslims, I also developed positive relationships with others. Some of them became lifelong friends, whose company I enjoy to this day. But, of course! For Muslims are individuals like anyone else, coming in all types and forms.

Some I encountered were lovely and kind, always going above and beyond to help me during those early days along the road. Some others were pretty horrible, behaving like bullies and chauvinists. Between those two groups, the uninterested, whose acquaintances I never made.

Those early experiences have been mirrored throughout my life. Many online Muslims cannot stand me — which is totally fine — but a few have likewise become lifelong virtual friends, many of whom regularly enquire after me even though we have never met in real life.

Similarly, in my local community, the bulk of the Muslim population entirely ignores my existence. Yet, still, I have my cohort of old uncles with whom I always exchange salams, the small group of brethren I’ll stop to have a chat with now and then, and then the closer friends who know my name and where I live, who will stop by for tea or a meal.

How is that different from anyone else’s experience, Muslim or otherwise? Isn’t this just the way of the world? We have friends and foes. People we get on with, and people we don’t. The unfamiliar crowd and the intimate companion. Those we share something in common with, and those we don’t understand at all.

To be fair is to remember the whole, not to isolate particular experiences. It may well be that we live in communities where a particular ethnic or social group dominates the discourse. But it may be that this group itself perceives itself as the disenfranchised group, trying to eek out a space amidst another dominant community.

To be fair is to remember that invitation to dinner, and not just the folk who forgot to give you salams. To be fair is to remember those multiethnic relationships spanning decades, and not just that experience amidst a transient community. To be fair is to remember those positive conversations online, and not just the dissenting voices which wrote off your entire faith and experience because you’re not sociologically Muslim.

To be fair is to revert to viewing other Muslims as humans just as complex as you, with all sorts of emotions, mood swings, prejudices, and desires. To be fair is to stop believing in the fairytales which construct pious utopias in the minds of the newly religious, which only sets us up for disappointment.

Be more human and you’ll see more humanity in others. Be fair, and you’ll discover a world which seems much fairer, inshallah.