The urge to judge: when religion becomes a checklist

A short video clip sparked a long conversation in our home. Two young women - both reverts to Islam - sat together, one gently teaching the other how to pray. The learner was visibly excited, though unsure and occasionally confused about the sequence. The teacher, instead of correcting harshly, kept encouraging her - celebrating each small step forward. What struck me was not just the interaction in the video, but the reaction beside me. My wife, who comes from a rural background in K-P and has had little formal education, watched with concern. "Why is she not wearing hijab?" she asked, almost instinctively. For her, this visible absence seemed to overshadow the learner's sincerity, eagerness and courage.

This moment, small as it may seem, captures a much larger paradox within our religious and social lives: we often judge people not by the direction they are moving in but by how closely they match a pre-defined image of what they should already be. The question is - where do these standards come from? They are rarely the product of deliberate reflection. More often, they are inherited. From childhood, we absorb what is considered "normal" in our families and communities. Over time, visible practices - dress, rituals, language - become shorthand for religiosity. They are easy to observe, easy to compare, and easy to enforce.

But there is a subtle shift that happens here. What begins as a practice becomes a marker of identity. And what becomes a marker of identity turns into a boundary - separating "us" from "them", the "right" from the "not so right". In such a framework, religion risks being reduced to a checklist. You either tick the boxes, or you don't. Yet human transformation rarely follows such neat lines. Faith is not an instant state but a gradual unfolding. It moves through stages - curiosity, doubt, learning, struggle, and eventually, internalisation. To expect someone at the beginning of this journey to display the outcomes of its later stages is not just unrealistic - it is fundamentally unjust.

This is where the prophetic model offers a quiet but powerful contrast. Early Muslims were not transformed overnight. The Quranic message itself was revealed gradually, allowing beliefs to take root before practices were fully imposed. The focus was not merely on outward conformity but on inward conviction. Contrast this with our contemporary tendency to prioritise form over essence. We often look for immediate alignment with visible standards, forgetting that such alignment, when detached from inner transformation, can produce little more than superficial compliance - or worse, quiet resentment.

Why, then, is it so difficult for us to move away from these rigid standards? Part of the answer lies in psychology. Clear standards provide a sense of certainty in an otherwise complex world. They allow us to categorise quickly and to make sense of others without engaging deeply with their stories. Challenging these standards is not merely an intellectual exercise - it can feel like destabilising one's own moral universe. There is also an emotional dimension. The standards we uphold are often tied to our own struggles, sacrifices and contexts - not those of others!

But perhaps the deeper issue is this: we have become more comfortable judging outcomes than understanding processes. It is far easier to comment on what is visible than to appreciate what is unfolding beneath the surface. A missing hijab is immediately noticeable; a growing conviction is not. A flawed prayer is easy to critique; a sincere effort to learn is harder to measure. The video I watched that day offered a different lens. The teacher did not impose a finished ideal on her student. She met her where she was. She recognised that progress, however imperfect, is still progress.

Perhaps that is what we need to recover. Not a lowering of standards but a rethinking of how and when they are applied. Not an abandonment of practices, but a deeper appreciation of the journeys that lead to them. Because in the end, the question is not whether people meet our standards. It is whether we understand people in their socio-cultural contexts.