Hatty, you wrote:
I have managed to find some of the original text. What I understood was: normally not all people are educated and knowledgeable and informed about different things. So there is a danger in manipulating those simple souls if they were only fed negative information.
The question to ask here is, WHY are all these people not educated? And if there is a reason why they are not educated, then how are they being given 'negative information'? If they have no means of accessing knowledge, no newspapers, radio, TV, or books, then by definition, it would be impossible to give them 'negative information'.
If they have access to information, but are not being educated with good information, then SOMEONE is not doing their jobs properly in educating these people.
On the other hand, there's also the logical possibility that they are being educated, but their education makes little sense to them, it is either malevolent in nature, or contradicts what they see around them, thus also leaving them open to other information which may be negative, but at least makes sense as a coherent whole. In which case, again, someone is not doing their jobs in PROPERLY educating these people in a manner which is not malevolent, and does not contradict what they see around them.
For instance, suppose a plumber wants to teach his son to be a plumber. But he is a very poor teacher and has an evil nature, he tells his son contradictory things, one day he tells his son to fix the pipes one way, the next day he tells his son to fix the pipes the other way, on some days he tells his son that the job of the plumber is to fix pipes, and the next day he tells his son they are going to sneak into the neighbor's house and break all the plumbing. This is malevolent and will make little sense, so it's quite likely that someone else will take advantage of this, and teach the son to be something else, anything else, besides a plumber, say an electrician or carpenter, if their teaching makes more sense.
For example here in the West, the majority of people do not know what Islam is? so they are easily miss-informed about Islam and they easily believe what their media tells them about Islam. So in this case, information can have negative effect.
Question, in what WAY do people in the west not know what Islam is? There are actually 2 equally valid ways of knowing what Islam is:
1. What it is
De Facto, or what most Muslims in the world actually do and behave like, or
2. What it is
De Jure, or what it theoretically says Muslims are supposed to behave like in the Koran.
Because there is often a very big difference between these two, and most people will tend to believe how they see Muslims actually behaving. Especially when any bad behavior on the part of some Muslims is repeatedly shown in newspapers and on TV.
To use my example of a plumber, if it says in some book about ethics for plumbers that the job of the plumber is to fix pipes, but most of the plumbers in some town are criminally insane, and actually spend most of their time breaking into people's houses and destroying the pipes, you cannot blame the people in that town for concluding that this criminal activity is what most plumbers actually do. Whatever it says in some book about ethics that plumbers should do regarding fixing pipes will be meaningless, so long as most of the plumbers in their town behave in this bad way. For a good plumber to claim that these bad people are not actually real plumbers is meaningless, and to point to what it says in some book about plumber ethics is meaningless, when all the bad plumbers claim that they are, in fact, plumbers, and point to other things in their own books that say that plumbers SHOULD behave in this bad way.
And the children of these plumbers, seeing the bad behavior of their fathers or uncles, will be easily convinced that being a plumber is a bad and senseless thing to be. Even though being a good plumber, and actually fixing the pipes, is actually a very good thing to do.
It will do little good in such a situation for a few good plumbers who actually do fix pipes, to tell other people that they have a mistaken idea of what plumbers should actually do. So long as most of the plumbers in this town keep behaving badly, they are never going to be believed, not even by their own children. It is a waste of their time to complain that other people do not like plumbers. It would be far better for them to organize, and put a stop to the bad behavior of the other plumbers. Once they have actually stopped all this bad behavior on the part of other plumbers, THEN they might someday be believed by other people.
The original text was advising against not to befriend those people who sweet talk and who have beautiful appearance and at the same time they use it in order to corrupt other people who are simple and innocents.
Again, if people can be easily corrupted, either someone is not doing their job in educating them in the first place, or in fact, they are NOT being corrupted, the educator was the one who corrupted them, and they are, in fact, being corrected (to a certain degree). To use my example of a plumber again, if a father who is a plumber teaches his son to break into houses and destroy pipes, or even if the son just sees his father or uncle doing these bad things, it will be very easy for someone else to 'sweet talk' his son and convince him that being a plumber is wrong. But the problem here lies not mainly with the 'sweet talking person' (despite the fact that they are wrong as well, there is nothing inherently bad about being a plumber), but rather, with the very bad education and bad behavior of the father and uncle.
