Beyond the Muslim Technologist

We read Jihad Esmail’s “The Muslim Technologist” with a strange mixture of agreement and frustration, which is perhaps the most productive way to encounter an essay like this because we do not think he is wrong about the problem, at least not in the normal sense. This is one of the more serious attempts we have seen to think about Muslim technological agency beyond the usual questions of whether this or that app is halal, whether Muslims should enter STEM, or whether we need more Muslim founders, or whether somebody can somehow bolt an Islamic ethics committee onto whatever Silicon Valley was already going to build anyway. Esmail understands that technology is not neutral. He understands that the environments we build eventually begin building us, and that technological systems do not become Islamic merely by Muslims populating them or because Islamic content travels through it. His discussion of amanah is useful here precisely because it tries to recover the human being from the degraded/debased categories of “user” or “consumer” and return technological action to something more serious, that is, responsibility before Allah.

All of this is very close to what we have been trying to articulate through the idea of Digital Hijrah, sometimes uncomfortably close. Esmail is reading Sacasas, Winner, McLuhan, etc., so he understands that attention itself has been industrialized and financialized, and he sees how creators become what he calls "digital sharecroppers." He is also rightly dissatisfied with Muslim technologies that amount to Silicon Valley products wearing Islamic branding. The question he asks about TikTok gets very near to the heart of the matter, "If 100 Muslims designed a social media platform from scratch, would it look like TikTok? Doubtful."

But I think this is exactly where we have to stop and ask a slightly more annoying question. Why have we already decided that they should build another social media platform?

This small change in the question is where I think the Muslim Technologist and the Digital Muhajir begin to separate from one another. One still instinctively imagines the Muslim as a builder operating upon the technological landscape, attempting to infuse the things he builds with a better ethic, while the other starts becoming suspicious of the entire landscape/architecture itself, including the categories handed to us for thinking about what building even means. Perhaps the problem is not that TikTok was designed by the wrong people according to the wrong values. Perhaps “the platform,” as we have come to understand it, is already part of the problem.

We mention this because Esmail’s essay repeatedly reaches something like bedrock and then, strangely, bounces back toward the content layer. The clearest example actually appears in his own biography. He describes working with YouTube creators and discovering that they owned almost nothing, where their audiences were not really theirs, and their livelihoods could change, or essentially disappear, because an algorithm was changed in some way. Even their creative instincts and behaviors were gradually reorganized around what the platform rewarded. He calls them "digital sharecroppers," which we think is exactly right, but once you use that metaphor the next question should become almost unavoidable, that is, who owns the land?

Instead the essay moves toward better forms of media, better worldviews, better brands, founders that understand what they believe in and can express it coherently. None of these things are useless of course, but they are answers operating one level above the question Esmail himself has uncovered. The sharecropper does not primarily need a more meaningful crop, what he needs is a different relationship to the land.

The same thing happens with McLuhan. “The medium is the message” is central to the essay, and Esmail is correct to treat it seriously. If the form of a technology shapes perception, then Islamic content poured through such architecture designed around compulsive engagement is still being formed by that architecture. A Muslim dawah influencer, for example, that tries to optimize every thought for an algorithm may imagine he is using the platform, while over time the platform is teaching him which Islamic thoughts are worth having because those are the ones that produce that sweet sweet engagement and revenue. Eventually the dawah itself begins taking the shape of the feed.

But then why stop there?

If the medium is indeed the message, then we should consider that the startup is also a medium, right? Venture capital could also be considered a medium. A centralized login system is a medium. The corporation, with its bureaucratic culture and obsessive optimizations, is a medium. Consider that the cloud is not simply some neutral place where the application happens to live. And the fiat monetary system financing all of this is certainly not neutral either (we have a whole book written on this!). These forms establish incentives before a Muslim founder ever sits down to discuss maqasid with his team, and in many cases they establish the range of imaginable possibilities before any meaningful ethical conversation has even begun.

This is where I think the essay keeps McLuhan in the diagnosis stage while allowing something closer to Marc Andreessen back into the prescription. Muslim founders will assert their worldview. Muslim companies will compete in the marketplace of ideas, and perhaps Muslim technologists will build systems informed by revelation. But at the end of the day, it is still the builder striding onto the stage of modernity, except now he supposedly has better metaphysics or whatever.

Look, we are not against builders. We are not against Muslim businesses or engineers making money or Muslims creating things that other people want to use. It would be absurd to turn Digital Hijrah into some ritual denunciation of anyone who registers an LLC or 501(c)(3). The problem is the deeper assumption that the task before us is mainly to become better participants in the existing technological paradigm, or perhaps eventually its winners, when the paradigm itself is already working upon us long before we have an opportunity to work upon it.

The example of Inshallah makes this tension almost painfully clear because Esmail presents it as one of the promising glimpses of what the Muslim Technologist can produce, an example of “interest-free financial rails” from which a larger Islamic financial system might develop. Yet consider what the product actually teaches its users to do. Go to the website and see. You stake SOL into a liquid staking product. You borrow the stablecoin, iAUSD, against the staked SOL through what is described as a zero-interest loan. You then use the borrowed funds to buy more SOL. Then you stake that SOL again and repeat the process so that the effective yield increases.

We are not giving a fatwa on any of this. That would be missing the point, and in some ways the question of whether every individual contract can be formally defended as permissible is less interesting than what has already happened before we arrive at that question. We began with a critique of growth as an idol, of the inadequacy of the halal-haram floor, of technological systems carrying their own ethic, all good, but then somehow the flagship example deposits us into comically leveraged SOL yield optimization.

That should make us curious to say the least!

Because even if every component receives scholarly approval, we must stop and ask what kind of economic subject is being produced here? What conception of wealth and economic life is taken for granted? Nothing fundamental about the financial imagination has changed. The user is still being taught to recklessly maximize yield through increasingly abstract (debt-based) financial machinery. The monetary environment itself is never escaped; instead we become more ingenious participants within it. The framework has succeeded in making the product formally Islamic while leaving untouched the economic desires and structures that generated the product category in the first place.

This is the same problem Esmail himself warns about when he criticizes Islamic fintech that amounts to ordinary fintech with green branding. The uncomfortable part is that the Muslim Technologist framework still seems capable of, and likely incentivized to, generating exactly what it condemns.

And we do not think this is because the people building these things are insincere or malicious. That is actually what makes the problem more serious. If sincere Muslim technologists, armed with Islamic ethics, Maqasid, Amanah and all that, can still arrive at a leveraged staking loop and point to it as a foundation for an Islam-aligned financial order, then perhaps the problem is not simply that we need better intentions or more serious ethical deliberation. Perhaps we are still thinking inside a machine that answers many of our questions before we have learned how to ask them.

This is why Bitcoin necessarily enters the Digital Hijrah discussion differently than “crypto.” We are not interested in Bitcoin because Muslims need their own exciting corner of financial innovation. We would say that its importance is almost the opposite. Bitcoin places certain things outside the normal playground of the fiat financial engineer. The monetary supply is not perpetually redesignable by a centralized and captured foundation or company. You can hold it without opening an account with an institution. You can verify the rules yourself by running your own node. You can transact directly peer to peer. There is no requirement that somebody somewhere maintain a master database containing the authoritative version of your balance.

There is an important philosophical difference here. Much of crypto inherits the modern technological belief that everything becomes more interesting once it becomes programmable and financialized. Bitcoin is interesting, to us at least, partly because it says there are some things powerful people should no longer be able to program at the monetary consensus layer.

This same conflict appears outside the sphere of finance of course. The Habibi Tech summit that was just held last weekend, for instance, increasingly speaks about Muslim leadership in AI, Muslim participation in shaping technological development and the need to make sure Muslims are present across the emerging technological order. The current summit includes discussions about surveillance, concentrated power, ethical AI and even whether a conscientious Muslim should continue working inside Big Tech, so this is not a simple caricature of people blindly worshipping Silicon Valley. There are serious questions being asked there. At the same time, the broader imagination remains recognizable with Muslim founders, Muslim businesses, investment, policy influence, participation in the AI supply chain, a Muslim “seat at the table.” Their own summit language repeatedly frames the question around how Muslims can shape the emerging AI world rather than be left behind by it.

But what if being “left behind” is not the only danger? What if the more serious danger is being pulled forward according to somebody else’s direction and inside someone else's paradigm?

This is one of the things that bothers us about this builder mindset when it becomes the primary framework. It increasingly feels like it subtly views technological history as a race whose direction has already been determined, like there's this urgency around it. AI is arriving, the new stack is arriving, etc., therefore, the Muslim obligation becomes participation with better ethics, better representation and eventually more influence. There are moments when participation is necessary, obviously, but once the race itself becomes unquestionable we have already surrendered an enormous amount of agency. We are merely arguing about who gets a better position in the increasingly fragile running order characterized by fiat funded surveillance and enshittified closed source subscription services.

Ummah.city provides another instructive example because its instinct is, in one sense, admirable. It explicitly wants Muslim digital life to be “owned by Muslims, not Meta,” and it is trying to gather communication, email, charity and other services into an environment belonging to the Muslim community rather than a zionist supporting corporation. (It claims that) It does not sell attention, and some of its communications are end-to-end encrypted. Those things are commendable.

But the form is revealing: “The Muslim internet. One app.” One identity travels across the centralized and permissioned system. One sign-in, which the user does not own, ties the different services together. We see that the answer to Meta becomes another centralized ecosystem, except this time administered by Muslims.

Please understand that we are not saying that Ummah dot city is exactly equivalent to Meta. We are asking why our imagination of Muslim sovereignty keeps recreating the same topology and foundation. Something is wrong here.

If the problem with Meta is ultimately that Mark Zuckerberg is not Muslim, then it's very easy to think that Muslim ownership fixes the problem. If the problem is that an enormous portion of social existence has been centralized behind administrative chokepoints where identity and relationships exist at the pleasure of an operator, then changing the operator does not get us nearly far enough. A Muslim walled garden is still a walled garden, waiting to be bought out by some Jewish oligarch.

This is why I find myself much more interested in protocols than platforms. Nostr (https://nostr.org/), for instance, is interesting not because it is “the Islamic Twitter” which, besides from being inaccurate, would completely miss the point, but because there does not need to be anything resembling Twitter at the center of it. The identity can actually belong to the user through a pair of public and private keys. Different clients can appear and disappear without taking that identity with them. Relays can be operated by different communities. The architecture itself creates possibilities that become difficult to imagine if our starting assumption is that somebody needs to build the Muslim social network.

This distinction that we are trying to highlight is much closer to what we mean by Digital Hijrah.

Hijrah here is not being used as a cheap analogy in which downloading Linux becomes equivalent to the Prophetic migration, nor is this some fantasy of retreating from modern life and performing technological purity until we all disappear into woods or something. I mean something much simpler and also much harder, where we develop a conscious orientation away from systems in which our agency is continually rented back to us and toward forms of life in which possession, competence and responsibility can again become ordinary.

And this is where we think Esmail’s strongest point, that ethics is a communal business, should be pushed much further than the essay pushes it.

He is right that we first need a “we.” Alif and Nur House and other attempts to bring Muslim technologists into actual relationships with one another are valuable for precisely this reason. But what kind of community produces technological ethics? A professional scene can produce ethical documents and frameworks, and networks do eventually lead to startups. All of that might be useful, but there is a more basic kind of knowledge that can only become available after people begin living differently.

Consider that you could understand self-custody differently after holding your own keys. You understand censorship differently once your identity is no longer something a platform can delete. You understand the cloud differently after operating a server and realizing that “the cloud” was mostly somebody else’s computer with a recurring fiat bill attached. You begin understanding the relationship between technical competence and community once people around you actually depend on something you operate.

Understand that the ethics emerge through the practice because the practice alters what you can see and perceive!

This is why we are increasingly suspicious of the assumption that we first develop a Muslim technological ethics and then go build according to it. That sequence is too clean. Ethics does not come from nowhere, and neither does ethical reasoning. If the people deliberating about Muslim technology have spent their entire lives inside captured technological environments, using riba based fiat money, custodial services, corporate platforms and rented identities as the invisible background of ordinary online life, those assumptions will inevitably enter the ethical framework itself. Nobody needs to consciously insert them. They are already there.

A community that has never experienced digital ownership may sit down and sincerely ask what an Islamic social platform should look like, without realizing that the most important Islamic question might concern whether there should be an administrator capable of owning everyone’s identity in the first place.

That is the difference we are trying to get at when we contrast the Muslim Technologist with the Digital Muhajir. One is primarily a role. The other is a mindset.

The Muslim Technologist can remain perfectly legible to the existing order. He can have the company, funding round, conference panel and product launch while arguing, sincerely, that all of it is being redirected according to Islamic principles. The Digital Muhajir is asking something prior to all of that, which is, where am I still a tenant, and what would it take to stop being one?

Sometimes the answer is Bitcoin. Sometimes it is Linux or self-hosting. Sometimes it is Nostr or another open protocol. Sometimes it is merely refusing to surrender some tiny capability because convenience has trained us all to believe that competent adults should be incapable of operating anything themselves. None of these technologies is Islamic in itself (we actually think calling them “Islamic technology” would reproduce the mistake). They are useful because their architecture can permit different relationships between human beings and technological power.

This is also why Digital Hijrah is not an argument that Muslims must withdraw from every existing institution. Exit and voice are not absolute categories. Muslims will continue working at technology companies, building businesses and participating in institutions that we do not control, because we actually live in the real world. But the orientation changes once exit becomes thinkable. We no longer assume every battle must be won on terrain chosen for us.

And I think this is the part of the Hijrah metaphor that is most relevant.

The Hijrah was not passivity, and it was certainly not surrender. It was not a refusal to act politically because Mecca had become difficult. It was intentional movement toward another ground upon which a community could be constituted differently, and from that new ground possibilities emerged that were not available under the prior conditions. We would be very careful about turning that history into a one-to-one analogy for digital technology, but we assert that the orientation is worth recovering. You cannot overcome an order by becoming the most ethical participant inside it.

Sometimes you leave enough of it behind that something else, something new, becomes possible.

So this is our plea to brother Esmail, because we think his essay has already done more than he may realize to prepare the ground for this. Amanah and agency are there. The recognition that technology shapes the soul is there. The dissatisfaction with Muslim copies of secular products is there. Even the insistence that a real community has to precede a serious technological ethic is there.

But what I think is missing is Hijrah.

Follow the argument further downward, beneath the product, beneath the brand, beneath the startup, until we reach the infrastructure and the forms of dependency that determine what kinds of products we imagine in the first place. Apply McLuhan not only to TikTok but to the company building the replacement for TikTok. Apply the critique of growth not only to Silicon Valley but to the Muslim founder whose Islamic product must continuously acquire users to justify its funding. Apply the critique of riba not only to the explicit interest rate but to the monetary order and the financial subject produced inside it.

Then the Muslim technologist can still exist. We hope he does. But his task becomes something slightly different. He is no longer the heroic builder who will construct the correct technological future for the Ummah while everyone else becomes his user base. He becomes part of a community, of both builders and users, engaged in migration, building tools that increase the capacity of ordinary Muslims to own things again, understand the systems they depend upon and leave when necessary. The builder himself has to migrate too.

Tie your camel and trust in Allah, Esmail reminds us. He is right that tawakkul cannot become an excuse for passivity. But before tying the camel, perhaps we should look around for a moment and ask why we are so determined to keep it inside somebody else’s enclosure.