بِسْمِ ٱللَّٰهِ ٱلرَّحْمَٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ
In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate

Predictable Moves due to Narrow Scans

Have you noticed how Muslim-led organizations in Ontario tend to say and do the same things? Whether it’s a mosque, a charity, or an advocacy org, they have a lot of similarities. Their communications, the types of events, who they engage with, the governance, etc. It all feels copy and paste. Now that’s not necessarily a problem. Firstly, it’s understandable since they provide services to Muslims. And secondly, it makes it easy for Muslims to navigate services based on familiarity, recognition, tradition, etc. But I would argue the copy-paste approach is not fit to address societal issues facing Muslims in Ontario, such as Islamophobia or policy issues, where major external forces and trends have to be accounted for. Because in these scenarios, the copy-paste approach is predictable. And predictable actions can be easily deterred.

I see this phenomenon as a manifestation of what happens when you narrowly scan the environment. A critical part of developing an effective strategy to gather a wide range of information from the environment. This can lead to developing more strategic options, anticipating the effects of those options with greater clarity, and ultimately more effective decisions.

Based on the info Muslim leaders in Ontario use for their decision-making in response to community issues, there’s a lot of room for improvement in their environmental scans. I don’t see evidence that they routinely collect, analyze, and make sense of information from multiple perspectives. Instead, I see a tendency towards groupthink for Muslim community leaders when it comes to addressing issues or long-term plans. They seem to source the same sets of information and use a single interpretive lens to understand it and develop single-framed responses.

Shifts in Attitude to Widen the Scan

So what can Muslim community leaders in Ontario do to improve their environmental scanning? I believe whatever improvements they take, it requires a significant attitudinal shift. While there is a technical (how to) way of strategically approaching environmental scans, ‘Designing with Adab’ focuses more on the upstream ways of thinking, rather than the how to. The latter is something we can discuss more live in conversation or in specific and applied contexts.

Note: this assumes you’re already at a basic understanding of media literacy in today’s landscape. Meaning you know how to understand sources, detect biases, be critical of media formats, omitted information, etc. There’s no sense in going further if you don’t do that well.

The strategic benefits of a more mature posture towards environmental scanning
I’ll just touch on two major attitudinal shifts and their strategic benefits. There may be more, but this is not meant to be exhaustive.

(i) Find holes in your own narrative, don’t just validate it without self-critique

• How it widens the enviro scan: This is the idea of complicating the narrative. Going out of your way to seek out information that would upend how you understand the topic at hand.
  
  
• Strategic benefits: This is strategically beneficial because your downstream decisions will better account for greater complexity. And you can avoid getting trapped in simplistic actions that are ineffective, or worse, even harmful.
  
  
• Resistance to overcome: My observations tell me this is not a desired posture by Muslim leaders because of their eagerness to prove their perspective correct. Perhaps this is an accidental import of a posture of being on the haque in theology over to societal context (i.e. navigate issues for life in Ontario).

(ii) Make the best, most convincing, argument of opposing views, rather than dismissing them

• How it widens the enviro scan: This is about “steelmanning” the opposing views. This requires you to see issues through multiple paradigms/worldviews to understand how opposing views would make sense of the issue at hand. You’d need to know the information that supports those views and how they are formed and argued.
  
  
• Strategic benefits: Doing this can result in better anticipating the counterpart’s reaction, so you can account for those in your proposed actions, or at least understand where your actions have weak points.
  
  
• Resistance to overcome: I believe this is not a desired posture by Muslim leaders because many cannot stomach giving legitimacy, even as an intellectual or strategic exercise, to opposing views. Leadership cannot afford to remain in that comfort zone.
  
  I recognize there is a balance to strike here when it comes to legitimizing opposing views. This requires knowing which opposing views are worth accounting for. You don’t want to be stuck responding to every troll. That’s a losing game and not the point.

Hypothetical example: Muslim-led advocacy made more effective through wider enviro scanning
Let’s say a Muslim-led organization is doing advocacy work. Let’s say it involves them encouraging the Canadian Government to address certain policies that unfairly target Muslims. Let’s say there’s evidence to suggest this is in fact a real issue that should be addressed, but perhaps the evidence is limited yet indicative, but not fully comprehensive.

The mature attitude/posture might ask critical questions like: “In what ways can this evidence be interpreted differently? In what ways could those who were speaking have different paradigms that legitimize their defence/ the outcome”. Now maybe some Muslim community leaders are taking that approach. Maybe that’s not a big gap to close. Okay, fair.

Where there is an enormous gap is when it comes to considering the wider environment (via scanning) and developing more strategic actions. For example, they could account for the prevailing and negative public exhaustion about identity groups seeking change from government through lobbying efforts. So they may ask themselves questions around that, such as: “How might we frame our advocacy to pre-empt perceptions and/or differentiate our work from this sentiment?” It’s not a dismissal of the public’s perception, rather it’s a way to work with it, without it being a barrier. I think you get the point…I hope.

Developing strategies that come out of a wider scan of the environment allows Muslim community leaders to be more strategic. A little more unpredictable, a lot more effective.

Strategic Hope in Unified-but-not-Uniform
There’s a lot of discourse about Islamic unity, being unified as Muslims, and the like. In my opinion, that conversation is an endless one – and rightfully so. But what I’m optimistic about is the increasing recognition by Muslim community leaders in Ontario that being unified doesn’t mean acting uniformly. There is a growing desire to appreciate that and bring multiple interpretive lenses to the issues the communities face. A single, uniform, collective response is needed for some issues, but not everyone of them (especially when context-dependent and complex in nature).

I would imagine Muslims in Ontario share a general direction of the quality of life they aspire towards. We can recognize that in the societal domain, there are many paths to get there. I hope that this posture will translate into leaders who seek out and collect a wider range of information as part of their environmental scanning. And that this wider range of information translates to strategic actions that are diverse, dispersive, and ultimately more effective.

Allah knows best

الله أعلم