Perhaps the most powerful question I have ever learned to ask is: “Are we solving the right problem?”
We’ve all come across situations where we get caught up in the complexities of situations, lose sight of the true goal, or get so excited about a potential solution that we skip the due diligence required to vet it out. Phrases like missing the forest for the trees, or if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail come to mind in this regard.
The question are we solving the right problem is an important heuristic that helps us to both break down a complex issue into a solvable problem, and then validate that solution.
Although seemingly simplistic, it is a powerful tool that helps us framework our thinking and approach. It’s a way to tangibly think in an innovative and practical way when much of our problem solving can be muddied by a barrage of information (in varying degrees of relevancy) and even complicated personal dynamics.
Formally, some refer to this as first principles thinking, and it was popularized somewhat as a major innovative strength of Elon Musk (Twitter debacle notwithstanding).
Applying this approach in a broad sense consists of 3 steps:
Identify your current assumptions
Break down the problem into its fundamental principles
Create new solutions from scratch.
Recently, I visited a masjid that had a bathroom setup that prompted me to ask that very question - what problem are we solving?
The setup they had is not one that was unfamiliar or strange by any stretch of the imagination. Under normal circumstances nothing about it would have stood out as breaking any kind of norm. Seeing this setup after going through Covid (and becoming exponentially more sensitive to the spreading of germs), however, is not normal circumstances.
In this masjid, you take off your shoes and enter the larger wudu area. From there, you can go through a door to the restroom area. The restroom area has the dreaded pile of wet, soggy, mismatched, and too small or too big slippers.
Here, you are expected to put on these slippers, use the restroom, exit, make wudu and go pray. If you do not follow this procedure, you run the risk of getting yelled at by someone who accuses you of spreading impurity in the masjid.
Let’s get to our first principles thinking.
Identify your current assumptions
This set up exists because someone said this is how we preserve purity in our places of worship, and prevent traces of any impurity from spreading. Everyone wears slippers. Those slippers are the thing that makes contact with the dirty bathroom floor. And those slippers remain in the restroom area only.
Based upon this assumption, architectural blueprints are drawn up to implement this system. A shoe rack is placed in the restroom area with dozens of cheap foam slippers from the dollar store and pairs of accidentally stolen Crocs. Whether Crocs are better suited as a hip fashion statement for teenagers or something to be worn only in the restroom is a debate for another time.
From this assumption a culture is also created. Although it is certainly not a rule that you cannot wear your shoes into the restroom, the weird looks and occassionaly caustic comments create enough social pressure to make people conform.
Break down the problem into its fundamental principles.
The problem we actually need to solve is ensuring that we have a way of enabling people to use the restroom and make wudu in a way that upholds Islamic standards of cleanliness.
Does the set up described above solve for that?
At a medium sized masjid, between Friday prayer and Sunday School, imagine that a certain number of children use this restroom (with the slippers being comically large for them). We can expect a certain amount of … incidental splatter. That is going to end up on both the top and bottom of the slippers.
When the next person comes in, they are putting on those very same slippers. Now we have a transfer problem - either to socks or to bare feet. We don’t need to belabor the point to understand how both are problematic.
Even if one were to argue that we can overlook this point because the person will go directly to the wudu area and wash it off, we still have major problems. This assumes that everyone who uses the restroom is going to make wudu, that people aren’t wiping over their socks, and that people are actually washing their feet properly.
Regardless, you not only have the spread you were trying to avoid, this set up is disgustingly unhygienic when you really stop and think about it. In no world is the unnecessarily forced sharing of splattered slippers upholding our principles of taharah (purity).
Create new solutions from scratch.
Given this, we need to find a new approach.
How might we design a masjid bathroom area that provides the best level of cleanliness? Perhaps the solution is to let people wear their shoes into the restroom area, putting a mat outside, further separating it away from the wudu area, or something else altogether.
Whatever the solution is, we need to make sure it is solving the right problem.
Where else have you seen situations where a first principles thinking approach is needed?
Love this post! It's a subject that I've long thought about. I don't really have a great solution, although some masjids in South Africa had an effective system whose details are now a bit fuzzy. I think the wudu area had rubber mats with no shoes, and the sandals lived in the individual bathrooms and could not be taken out of the stall. They also had eastern style squat toilets, which is closer to the sunnah and cuts down on "spillage." JAK for drawing attention to an oft-overlooked aspect of Muslim life!
Assalam Alaikum,
I second brother Hamzah’s example. Let’s extend brother Ibn Abee Omar’s concern about possibility of splatter from children. The next obvious step after leaving the same possibly soiled slippers in the stall is to then perform wudhu whereby the possibility of filth is removed.
But if we widen the circle of concern a bit more to take a principles first approach, another principle to apply would be to act based on what is apparent and evident, while minimising concern around what is merely possible or requires further dependent possibilities to become reality.
The tangential example would be that one’s wudhu is intact when walking barefoot through a passage based on the apparent observation of the passage being dry and free from observable filth. Thoughts of the possibility of secondary contact here would be minimised to favor the observable and apparent default assumption that the area is clean.
Thus, walking out of the bathroom stall while leaving the slipper in the stall, then cleaning the feet with water, leaving only apparently clean water on the rubber mats, would seem to satisfy a casual observer’s assumption that the general wudhu area is clean and the wudhu maker’s observance complete and intact to proceed to prayer.
However, if we were to stick to Ibn Abee Omar’s example of using designated slippers through the bathroom area: 1) we would have the option of seeking an apparently dry and clean pair to our best observation 2) applying the principle of defaulting assumptions towards what is apparent, assume that the select clean and dry pair is clean from possible filth unless otherwise observable 3) other mitigating possibilities further exist that can allay the fears of possible filth on the slippers. For example, the one wearing it will observe the filth and clean it, or by virtue of actively cleaning and pouring water over their feet, the residual water will clean any residual filth on the slippers as well. 4) finally by the time the wudhu maker reachers the prayer area, they would have left behind the slipper even if it were to have residual filth. Then the filth on their feet would have been minimised by already carrying out the washing, and their walking over the area towards the prayer hall would have via friction rubbed off traces of filth sufficiently enough to fall within the observably accepted condition of cleanliness for prayer.
The point being at the end of this, that the various practical elements, and dependent occurrences needed to retain a large enough amount of filth to cause a problem are being mitigated. Thus, the solution being applied is at least reasonably satisfactory to solve the root problem being addressed.
Given that so many dependant conditions are needed to consider the possibilities to resolve for the obtainment of a valid wudhu by a maker and clean place of prayer for all prayers, every location should have its own consideration of how to most effectively design a strategy to this end. For example, if the outside environment is dry, dusty, and relatively isolated, it seems more likely that shoes from outside will be clean enough by the time they reach the inside of the masjid foyer. But a wet environment close by the hustle and bustle of a busy city will reach a different conclusion based on observable matters.
The principles based approach would allow for as many considerations as needed to obtain the end result.