Preface: Alif and Communities of Practice
A couple of years ago, I told a bunch of my friends that I was going to organize a “Muslim tech conference.” I was going to bring ~200 people together in Chicago, invite panelists that ranged from formally educated Islamic scholars to tenured Silicon Valley professionals, and put them in conversation with one another. The goal of this conference was to establish a Muslim Tech Ethics: what should Muslims be building? How should we approach technology as a culture?
There was just one problem: I was getting married. I had just started my own business with Native. There were a lot of things that I needed to do besides organizing a conference, and frankly, I didn’t have the network to make it happen.
In hindsight, that network didn’t even really exist yet. When Omar and the team started organizing the Alif summit, it became clear to me that they were taking the right approach. Before we could have conversations about tech ethics and new funding organizations, we needed to establish America’s Muslim tech scene. In other words, people needed to come together before and meet one another before they could do anything together. I was jumping the gun.
The summit happened in February 2025. Nur House, Chicago’s hub for Muslim builders and creatives, opened its doors in April, riding the wave of momentum that had come out of the summit. There were technologists from Chicago who had never met one another until Alif, and Nur House was the first home that brought them together under both a spiritual and professional banner.
Without that we, there is no conversation about ethics.
L.M. Sacasas captured this problem with surgical precision: “Regrettably, we have very few communities located between the individual and the state constituting a we that can meaningfully deliberate and effectively direct the use of technology.”
Ethics is a communal business. But modern liberal societies, structured around atomized individuals competing in markets, don’t have a real we. And as an Ummah, our we is often too broad to have these more specific conversations about industry and subculture.
The conversations that spawned from Alif weren’t necessarily focused on developing a new philosophy, but occasionally those conversations arose. Someone would ask: what if we built our own systems? What if we didn’t just consume Silicon Valley’s products with a bismillah?
This essay is written in thankfulness to the community that has been established. Now, it is time to sketch the outline of what a “Muslim technologist” is, and why our moment – this precise historical moment – demands our worldview.
A Lack of Belief
During college, I helped co-found a YouTube agency called AMA. We helped big creators grow their audiences and make more money. I saw firsthand what it meant to be powerless to a platform. Creators didn’t own anything. Not their audiences, not their content, not even their own attention. They were digital sharecroppers, farming engagement on platforms they’d never control. Their livelihoods rose and fell based on algorithm changes made in boardrooms thousands of miles away by engineers who’d never watched their videos.
Many creators fell out of love with making videos and pursuing their interests just to chase whatever the algorithm was rewarding that quarter. The platforms shaped creators far more than creators shaped platforms.
Eventually, that business got acquired. I started working in crypto, where it seemed like people were trying to invent new funding and organizational models. Despite all of the problems and degeneracy in crypto, it’s a very malleable technology, and it attracted dreamers who saw the opportunity to build new futures and economic models for their work.
That work led me to an onchain media business, Forefront, where I became editor-in-chief. We researched how decentralization might allow new kinds of businesses, investing, and media – how ownership structures could shape ideas, how token mechanics could create different incentives than advertising.
I wrote Luxury Media, an essay that argued the future of media wasn’t about scale but about funding points of view. Luxury Media is a recognition that meaning is created by communities, and the media organizations of the future will be funded as propaganda arms for the worldviews that they’re pushing forward. In other words, business models rooted in belief.
The problem, I found, was that there weren’t many believers. When you’re building technologies to connect people based on meaning, you need some meaning-making. I found myself talking to companies that were building really cool tech, but were lacking a worldview that got people excited and shifted their identities. I was largely inspired by Toby Shorin’s belief that we are moving “from an era where brands are designed to sell products to an era where brands are designed to be culture, to transform lives, to instill beliefs.”
Today I run Native, a company that helps founders shape their worldviews and put that thesis into practice. We like to say that we are “shaping the ideas that shape us.” Most businesses lack a cohesive worldview. Even the most brilliant founders struggle to articulate their own.
My work has circled around one conviction: if you don’t assert a worldview, the world will impose one on you. And right now, the world is imposing Silicon Valley’s worldview on everyone.
The Cosmic Trust
By definition, Muslims have a coherent worldview. It is complex and multi-faceted, but its individual elements are simple yet powerful. For the purposes of this conversation, the most relevant part of our ‘aqeedah is trusteeship:
“We offered the cosmic trust to the Heavens! To the earth! To the mountains! Yet they all refused to carry it, and trembled from it, but humans embraced the trust.” (Quran, 33:72)
Humanity is differentiated in creation because we accepted the trust, the amanah, and we have the freedom to make choices to uphold or ignore this trust.
Abderrahmane Taha, the Moroccan philosopher, believed that this is the central point of differentiation between Western philosophy and Islam. In an essay on his life, Shaykh Saaleh Baseer noted that Taha believed:
“This verse contains enough cosmic, and ethical, content as a departure point from Western intellectual thought.”
Humans are not primarily consumers, producers, or even autonomous individuals. Those are all secondary. Primarily, humans are trustees. We accepted a trust that even the mountains feared.
To uphold this amanah, humans were given the power to exercise agency. Writer Simon Sarris has my favorite definition of agency:
“Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something differently from, or in addition to, the events that simply happen to you.”
Going to college, getting a job, starting a company, running for office – any of these things could be indicative of a sense of agency, but they could also be things that “simply happen to you.” They can be a reflection of you just going with the flow.
Agency is not just about action; it’s about the relationship between action and belief.
The most dangerous idea in the world is that action alone produces good outcomes. This is Silicon Valley’s gospel: move fast, break things.
But Muslims know that action without orientation to Allah is chaos. The amanah requires not just action, but stewardship. Not just capability, but responsibility. Our moral responsibility is to exercise agency in the way of Allah.
And in our moment – this specific moment in history – the clearest and most consequential arena for that agency is technology.
Technology is the Religion of the West
Technology is not just a tool anymore. It has become the de facto religion of the West.
Technology has prophets (Steve Jobs, Sam Altman), scripture (whitepapers, manifestos), rituals (product launches, demo days), pilgrimages (to Silicon Valley).
L.M. Sacasas observed: “Technology is a god to us, albeit a ‘god that limps’… We trust ourselves to it, assign to it salvific powers, uncritically answer its directives, and hang our hope on it.”
This technological worship manifests through three primary idols:
1. Growth
Progress at any cost. More users, more engagement, more revenue, forever. Venture capitalists cheer blitzscaling even when it burns billions.
“Growth solves all problems.” If you’re growing, you’re good. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. There’s no concept of “enough,” no notion of sustainability, no question of whether the growth serves any purpose beyond itself.
This is why tech companies will literally destroy their own products if it means more growth. Instagram was a beautiful photo-sharing app. Now it’s a TikTok clone. Twitter was a place for concise thoughts. Now it’s… whatever X is. The products don’t matter. Only the growth matters.
2. Attention
Content for content’s sake. TikTok doesn’t care if your video is educational or mind-numbing, beautiful or degrading, true or false. It only cares that you keep scrolling. The algorithm is agnostic to value, it only measures engagement.
Kids now grow up curating themselves as “content” before they understand privacy, intimacy, or dignity. They perform their lives for invisible audiences, optimizing their personalities for virality.
Even the idea of “being a founder” is now centered on attention. People start companies as a means of building their personal brand.
Attention has become the universal currency, and everything is being reformatted to earn it.
3. Inevitability
The belief that “if we don’t build it, someone else will.” This is the ultimate moral escape hatch. AI researchers admit they fear their creations might destroy humanity but justify their work by pointing at China. Social media executives know their platforms are destroying democracy but shrug and say it’s inevitable.
“Someone’s going to build it anyway” becomes the universal absolution.
Yet as Sacasas pointed out, in an essay titled “One Does Not Simply Add Ethics to Technology,” this supposed inevitability is actually ideological conditioning: “Technology is not neutral and, in its contemporary manifestations, it embodies a positive ethic.”
Today’s technology isn’t neutral ground awaiting our values, but rather it’s already occupied territory with its own moral architecture. When we uncritically adopt Silicon Valley’s tools, we inherit their embedded ethics whether we realize it or not.
Sacasas traced how this became America’s new civil religion:
“Historically, Americans have been divided by region, ethnicity, race, religion, and class. Americans share no blood lines and they have no ancient history in their land. What they have possessed, however, is a remarkable faith in technological progress that has been periodically rekindled by one sublime technology after another all the way to the space shuttle program and its final mission.”
Some time in the 20th century, Christianity collapsed as America’s organizing ideology. Technology filled the void.
And Muslims, in our civilizational insecurity, import the same idols. We build “Islamic” fintech that’s just regular fintech with green branding. We create “halal” social networks that replicate every toxic pattern of their secular counterparts. We pursue the same metrics and optimize for the same outcomes.
Why not push our own values? Why not offer the Truth in what we build?
The Islamic Response: Tie Your Camel
Islam gives us another path entirely.
A bedouin came to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ with a question that captures the entire Islamic philosophy of action:
“Should I tie my camel and trust in Allah, or should I leave her untied and trust in Allah?” The Prophet replied: “Tie her and trust in Allah.”
This is the Islamic posture toward technology. Tawakkul (trust in Allah) does not mean passivity. It means taking responsibility for what’s in your control while surrendering what isn’t.
We are trustees. The amanah requires agency. We cannot abdicate responsibility by adopting Silicon Valley’s defaults and hoping Allah will fix the wreckage. We cannot import their values wholesale and slap an “Islamic” label on top.
But this is exactly what Muslims do today. We get embarrassed about our ethics. We hide our values under the excuse of “professionalism” or “separation of church and state.” We convince ourselves that invoking revelation in a design sprint is somehow backward. We whisper our principles while Silicon Valley shouts theirs from every stage.
Langdon Winner warned about this tendency toward accommodation:
“While positive, utopian principles and proposals can be advanced, the real field is already taken. There are, one must admit, technologies already in existence—apparatus occupying space, techniques shaping human consciousness and behavior, organizations giving pattern to the activities of the whole society.”
Any Islamic consideration of technology must grapple with this reality: we’re not designing on a blank canvas. But recognizing this shouldn’t lead to accommodation, it should inspire more deliberate resistance.
Meanwhile, Peter Thiel has no hesitation invoking Christianity:
“Science and technology are natural allies of ‘Judeo-Western optimism,’ especially if we remain open to [the idea that] God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth.”
Marc Andreessen writes manifestos about “techno-optimism” that read like religious texts. Sam Altman talks about AGI with the fervor of a prophet. They’re not shy about their metaphysics. Why are we?
Even more provocatively, consider Kevin Kelly’s theological vision of technology:
“We are here to surprise God. God could make everything, but instead he says, ‘I bestow upon you the gift of free will so that you can participate in making this world. I could make everything, but I am going to give you some spark of my genius. Surprise me with something truly good and beautiful.’”
How foolish of Kelly to think we have the power to surprise our Creator? Yet this theology of technological creativity has become Silicon Valley’s unofficial doctrine.
Shaykh Saaleh Baseer warns us bluntly:
“Neither do you have respect from the West nor from the angels if you lose your values trying to copy others.”
When we abandon our principles to fit in, we don’t gain respect – we lose it twice. We end up with neither worldly success nor divine support.
The World is More Malleable Than Ever
The world has never been more malleable.
When we say that the world is “malleable,” we’re referring to both its values and its technology.
Regarding values, Zygmunt Bauman captured it in Liquid Modernity: “More than ‘Post-modernism’… change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty.”
Identities once anchored in nation, class, or tradition now dissolve and reform monthly. There is no common value or belief system that holds us together. Whoever has the loudest voice gets their perspective heard.
On the other hand, our technology is more malleable as well. Tools once reserved for nation-states are now wielded by individuals. You can launch a currency from your laptop. You can broadcast to millions from your bedroom. You can coordinate thousands without any formal organization. You can build products that compete with corporations without raising capital.
The most important feeling I want to convey with this essay is urgency. This is not just something we should be thinking about, in a vacuum, as Muslims. The conversation we’re having today is more urgent than ever.
Culture is a contest. Islam is divine guidance. Muslim technologists must be vessels of that guidance while the world is still moldable.
Islam as Civilizational Blueprint
Marshall McLuhan’s line remains one of the most important insights of the 20th century: “The medium is the message.”
It’s not just what technology transmits, it’s what its very form does to us. The structure shapes the soul.
Social media give us new content, but it also rewires how humans pay attention. It created a new kind of consciousness: fragmented, anxious, performative. The 24/7 news cycle didn’t just replace the newspaper, but it made politics performative, leading to the rise of entertainers-in-office like Donald Trump.
In other words, we shape our tools, and then they shape us.
Early Muslims understood this instinctively. When they entered new lands, they didn’t just bring theology, they brought technology and institutions: madrasas, waqfs, markets. They were the media through which Islamic values became lived reality.
When Muslims failed to build these institutional technologies – when they relied on other civilizations’ structures – Islamic society withered within a generation. Every time Muslims thought they could maintain Islamic values using non-Islamic structures, they discovered McLuhan’s insight: the medium is the message.
Today, the primary institution shaping human consciousness is digital technology. So how should we, as Muslims, think about technology?
Islamic Tech Ethics: Beyond Halal and Haram
Most Muslim discourse about technology stops at the most superficial level: is this app halal? Can I use AI for this? Is crypto gambling?
These are important questions, but they’re arguably the most basic question we should be asking.
The question isn’t whether we can use secular technologies for Islamic purposes. The question is whether those technologies, by their very design, are aligned with our principles at all. TikTok could be halal or haram. Let’s argue that it’s halal.
If 100 Muslims designed a social media platform from scratch, would it look like TikTok?
Doubtful.
This is what Sacasas called the “ethical neutrality paradigm,” technologies becoming more ethically consequential while their moral implications become more obscured. A platform may appear neutral because it doesn’t prohibit Islamic content, but its underlying architecture might systematically reward the very behaviors Islam seeks to transform.
Rather than conversations of permissibility, Amana Raquib argues in Islamic Ethics of Technology that Muslim tech ethics must be rooted in the maqasid, the higher objectives of Shari’ah.
Al-Ghazali outlined the 5 maqasid as:
- Preservation of religion (din)
- Preservation of life (nafs)
- Preservation of intellect (‘aql)
- Preservation of lineage (nasl)
- Preservation of wealth (mal)
The first objective is preservation of religion itself. It’s the preservation of consciousness of Allah. It’s taqwa.
Raquib argues that if a technology doesn’t elevate God-consciousness, we should question it. If it actively diminishes taqwa – making us forgetful, distracted, anxious, envious – we should resist it.
This means moving past the minimalist floor of “is this technically permissible?” to ask “does this technology make us better trustees of the amanah?”
The Muslim Technologist
So who is the Muslim technologist?
First, Letters to a Young Technologist offers this definition of “technologist”:
“A technologist makes reason out of the world’s mess, envisions a different reality, and builds a pathway to it.”
A Muslim technologist takes this further. They don’t just envision “a different reality,” but envision a reality aligned with divine revelation.
This requires three fundamental commitments:
1. Amanah (Trusteeship)
We must recognize the responsibility we have to shape the world. We are stewards.
The Muslim Technologist understands that accepting the amanah means rejecting the comfortable fiction of technological neutrality. They cannot hide behind claims that “technology is just a tool.” They must take responsibility for the values embedded in their systems.
2. Agency (Directed Action)
Not waiting for permission. Not apologizing for our values. Not hiding behind “professionalism” or “secularism.” The Muslim technologist asserts Islamic values openly, builds them into systems deliberately, and competes in the marketplace of ideas confidently.
The Muslim technologist exercises agency – action aligned with belief – precisely to resist and replace those embedded ethics with Islamic alternatives.
3. Taqwa (God-Consciousness)
Ensuring that every design preserves and elevates consciousness of Allah.
This isn’t about adding “Islamic features” to secular products. It’s about designing from first principles that recognize the human as khalifa (steward), not just user and consumer.
The challenge is maintaining this consciousness while working within systems designed to erode it. The Muslim technologist must cultivate spiritual disciplines that preserve taqwa even while immersed in secular technological environments.
We already see glimpses of what’s possible:
One of my favorite examples is Inshallah. The team is laying interest-free financial rails that form the groundwork for a much larger, Islam-aligned financial system. By removing riba and centering fairness in design, it offers lower risk without sacrificing returns, making it attractive not only to Muslims but to anyone seeking a stronger foundation than conventional finance provides.
What once required the machinery of a nation-state – a fully independent financial system – is now being pioneered by a small team of Muslims.
But this is just the beginning. The Muslim Technologist envisions and builds systems that embody Islamic values not as afterthoughts but as foundational principles.
Return to the Amanah
Let’s return to where we began:
“We offered the cosmic trust to the Heavens! To the earth! To the mountains! Yet they all refused to carry it, and trembled from it, but humans embraced the trust.” (33:72)
The mountains trembled, but we said yes.
McLuhan reminds us: “There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”
Our technological future is not predetermined, at least not from our perspective. Every system we build, every pattern we establish, every default we set – these are choices that shape what becomes possible.
The world is more malleable than ever.
Technology is the lever that moves it.
The Muslim Technologist grasps that lever with full knowledge of the trust they carry.