The Pre-Upload Age: Welcome to the Muslim metaverse

Al Khawarizmi, the Islamic Golden Age polymath, is probably up there somewhere right now giving a wry half smile at his invention of the Algorithm within the halls of The House of Wisdom at some point in 825 CE. Unbeknownst to him at the time of invention, the details of his grand schematics would perish 500 years later in history’s most violent deletion of ideas during the Mongol sack of Baghdad. Meanwhile, the surviving kernels of that same idea would simultaneously immortalise taking itself and every idea ever with it, into the hyperreal digital ether of its own incarnation.

From his prodigious child: “The Algorithm”, would emerge icons such as, Date-flavoured Vapes, Sped Up Nasheeds, Qur’an AI Startups, Subway Surf 50/50 Islamic Lectures, Butterfly Abaya donning Italian Brainrot, Halal Dropshipping, Roblox Shia Raves, Nike-Tech Thobes and Twitch Stream Salah. Hybridisations both in name but also function between both digital secular codes and physical Islamic ornamentation. Green is again the hottest colour in the world, now Prophetic in different ways. Lime Brat and Pistachio Kunafa: the new Ummatic swatch. Or what I coin: Islamic Brainrot.

A dataset of online cultural codes has emerged amongst young Muslims increasingly concerned with physically annotating their Islam in digital fourth-spaces. These codes however, sold to us as radical acts of individuality, seem to have cornered a broad and situational faith movement into a homogenous monoculture at the mercy of Terms of Use Agreements. All of which outwardly state that for consumers to be most effectively marketed and sold to, they must group, and be grouped, into “aesthetic” driven cyber subcultures.

With our steady reclination into neo-liberal hyperindividualism since the 20th century, our digitally ordained identities have homogenised us into a keyword-sized set of minimal tropes. What results is a self-devouring condensation of a broad history into algorithmic keyword-sized “aesthetics”: low-exposure matcha, cats lying on prayer mats, slow-reverb nasheed audios processed with the same VST’s as Charli’s instrumentals, profile pictures of jaws turned away, blurred-eye bints, and bucking arabian war-horses. Intangible digital signatures of an equally ephemeral spiritual world. It’s been all too easy for a contracting group of Cloud landlords to starve us of a real world, and then attach us to a symbolic one of their creation.

The language of power has evolved into an adaptive and responsive narrative, written by machine learning authors, custom to your tastes and data. From a pre-modern history of perfect Truth and evil Falsehood to a century of post-truth, you are now fed bespoke autofiction. The chatbot assumes the position of an overly-sympathetic therapist, therapizing you into a state of passive, symbolic agreement. To the 20th Century’s Nuclear War answers the 21st Century’s feed, and its contingent fatalism of a threat always just one further phone screen length away. An AI-generated landscape of Muslims pillaging Big Ben, or another bestial fantasy, becomes the new Project Manhattan. The prospect of a simulated reality massaged onto screens by geopolitical, trans-economic actors of power supersedes any actual reality. As Jean Baudrillard says, “Simulation is no longer that of a territory… or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal…It is with this same imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real…coincide with their models of simulation.”

In a less and less physical world, symbolic gestures and the interiorised mind’s ability to imagine a space — a past — an order, is the lifeline of a great dream, that relies on the fuel of constant sleep. Meanwhile, during our simulated digital dream, occurs an actual physical reality. As we prompt GPT with questions on culture, we humour ourselves at its impression of us, and the machine concedes that it relies on us to “feed” the feed. A chatbot which depends on asking you whether you prefer Answer A or Answer B, massages your sleep and extracts energy from it, so that it may seize others, in theirs. Thus, it better produces coordinates, insights, duplicates and automations for more sinister outcomes, elsewhere.

Inevitably, out of this new metaverse emerges the “Muslim one”, as coined by Gary R. Bunt in his book Islamic Algorithms: Online Influence in the Muslim Metaverse : 

“The presence of state actors in these zones extends to academic investigations encouraged by governmental agencies to develop ‘understandings’ and (in some cases) mechanisms of control, censorship and submission…authorities can utilise online content to mobilise and reinforce agendas to synergise ‘approved’ forms of practices and discourse. As the digital divide reduces, this increasingly becomes an issue across diverse Muslim contexts. Along with other digital sectors, Muslim metaverses will compete with each other, but also with wider platforms and content (way beyond the parameters of Islam) as part of complex infotainment marketplaces.”

The complex infotainment marketplace which emerges takes the form of an increasingly polemicised and speculative contemporary fiqh discourse in a predominantly digitised post-salafist environment. Repairing and reframing rulings from the ashes of slow-burn process-oriented traditional orthodox schools of thought and glueing them back together via instant TikTok Imam Live Q&A’s. Although this too becomes wrapped and rearticulated in meme format through famous examples such as the page of @shaykhrasoul, who tiresomely trawls through the jesting questions of Gen Z and Alpha. 

The semi-genuine concerns of a dissociated youth become the contemporary fiqh discourse: the permissibility of eating pork in Minecraft, performing salah in Fortnite, and when they go to heaven: if their anime wife can be real when they get there? Despite the humour in this, more fraught questions emerge IRL: speculative classifications of facial recognition technologies, data farming, blockchain, cybernetics, nanotechnologies, bioengineering, and transhumanism suddenly colour these debates more cynically. Especially when these decisions are being made equally instantaneously, but in contrasting shrouded privacy, and often on government research stipends.

Freud’s apparent discovery of the Nafs directly imbued his nephew Edward Bernays with the zeal to pioneer and systematise a neuro-doctrinal approach to marketing. One that stands stalwart to this day, appealing to our deepest, darkest sentiments and desires in the shape of a never-ending stream of advertisements. Keenly ingesting these cues and developing increasingly fragile, loose impulses as a response is the body of 2 billion Muslims: lining prayer rows across the world, rapidly tapping X out of pop-up ads which blast their worshipping gaze, obscuring the view of their follow-along taraweeh Qur’an apps. 

These apps, however, feed live data to defence departments and ominous security contractors, as was uncovered by Vice’s Motherland in 2020. The investigative report exposed how some of the world’s largest Islamic apps, used for everything from geolocated prayer directions to daily moral imperative hadiths, are presented by a moderated and massaged machine learning algorithm. Despite this, apps like Muslim Pro, which is used by almost 10% of Muslims worldwide, continue to experience year-on-year growth, all while leaking data to active contractors of the US’s DoD. It begs the question: What does it mean when they launch an in-app AI Chatbot to ‘advise’ their users?

When a young Muslim girl is crying because she has had a bad day, and she opens her Islamic Reminders app to see a comforting narration, speaking to her exact moment and scenario: Is it the voice of Allah that she is hearing, or is it the voice of the algorithm? Is it a sign from Allah, or is it a sign from somewhere else, above? Even the most critically engaged Muslims may no longer be able to discern between a world of digital cues and spiritual karamaat – digital voices, and divine ones – in a world of increasingly blurred fates.

However, one thing is for certain: Muslims will react, respond, and pathologise algorithmic stimulation into real-world discourse and products. In simpler terms, we will take the ragebait and/or the joybait, but whether we respond to the wider world as our predecessors did with a Tahāfut al-Falāsifa quality work, or an AI-generated clip of iShowSpeed reciting Qur’an in gleeful response to a viral clip of him saying “assalamualaikum”, is up to us. As Baudrillard puts it: “When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning”. As long as we fail to see the inherent link between the algorithms’ grip on our feelings of reward and our subsequent reproduction of symbols to reincarnate those feelings virally, we will also fail to realise that both of those things are being farmed and used to aim Palantir’s missile gaze upon Gaza and elsewhere.

The further our dive into the digital ether takes us, the more we will be reduced of those basic human capacities. The more extreme our reactions, the less human they become. The foundations of the Islamic tradition, memorisation, intuition, and contemplation, are the first to be eradicated by an increasing dependence amongst Muslims on algorithmic feeds and AI Chatbots. The more space we delegate to AI, the more dominance it has over the narrative. As René Guénon, the famous writer on mysticism and modernity, put it in the early 20th Century: 

“This indeed is the most conspicuous feature of the modern period: need for ceaseless agitation, for unending change, and for ever-increasing speed, matching the speed with which events themselves succeed one another. It is dispersion in multiplicity, and in a multiplicity that is no longer unified by consciousness of any higher principle. The deeper one sinks into matter, the more the elements of division and opposition gain force and scope; and, contrariwise, the more one rises toward pure spirituality, the nearer one approaches that unity which can only be fully realised by consciousness of universal principles.”

The prosperity gospel that many Muslims sing to the beating drum of calls us to that ceaseless agitation, unending change, and ever-increasing speed which Guenon writes about. For every problem we solve with a new start-up, for every seed capital round, for every activation, and every piece of content produced, the online slop bloats, and the internet becomes less a place to search through libraries of references. And instead, a blur of the most recent random and rotted impulses, which mirrors in the global Muslim consciousness and the physical landscape which it inhabits. Rather than approaching the search bar with an idea, we forget it by the time the feed appears, and rather recline into an unending dispersion of multiplicity. We produce more and more for the sake of aesthetically virtuous aims, and instead accidentally contribute to a turning digital wheel of data which spins round and round, creating a kinesis for itself alone. One which only serves the macro outcomes of a machine and mind that only seek to gain force and scope, contrawise to pure spirituality and unity as Guenon concludes.

We may be reaching a reality transcendent of the physical realm, as hoped by the medieval colleagues of Khawarizmi. But instead of reaching a spiritual utopia, other invisible changes may be taking place within us: neurologically. Paradise is now seen and sold, through the hollow pupils of an Akh-Right course-seller, or a beamingly fair-skinned Digi Sufi Pir smiling through the skin whitening filters of his livestream. The vows of complete celibacy, eternal fasting and absolute charity made by three overzealous Companions was dismissed by the Prophet ﷺ in a famous hadith as a divine answer to a human problem, and if there is one thing that a network so hell bent on proving its divinity doesn’t want us to do, it’s act human.

Returning to his writings, Bunt suggests that the spread of Muslims worldwide is already post-post caliphal, and even post-nation state, but now pre-upload. Spread across the various “Muslim Metaverses”, or what he calls “iMuslims” permeate various algorithms and feeds, acting as unique geolocations and meeting points for various, often at odds, spiritual, intellectual and integrally emotional persuasions within Islam. The journeying of a lone wanderer on the road from Bukhara to Upper Egypt in search of the answers, as seen in films like Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979), is no longer the path of today’s Islamic wayfarer. Instead: a rapid zigzag across and between different digital borders in search of truth between seas of characters, content and comment sections, in the shade of an extremely polarised Bernays-esque hormone-secreting digital system of stimuli. The pulsating endocrinal systems of Muslims beat to the drum of electric currents. Terrence Stamp’s character in Meetings With Remarkable Men tells the films protagonist upon reaching the final, highest, most elevated spiritual school the world has to offer: “Everyone in the monastery learns the alphabet of these movements, they are exactly like books, we can read in them truths placed there many thousands of years ago.”

In the ending of Meetings With Remarkable Men, we see students in the Monastery performing ceremonial movements, imitating the shapes of numbers and letters, unifying, and giving real world form to these abstract written concepts. And there may, in fact, be a lesson there. The Machine is the greatest beneficiary of its own mythology. The conceptualisation of it as a formless, permeating and transcendent God in waiting is handing it the very victory it wishes to attain.

Sometimes we forget, with all things matter: they are but still matter. The letters and numbers of code that make up the skeletal body of all algorithms are in fact typed by the hands of humans, and even if now digitally written: they are limited by data which simply collects past iterations of what humans have already produced. What tomorrow produces however, is still within us. When plastic learns to walk and silicon learns to talk, will we look at smiling statues and sing their hymns of innovation? Will our bodies imitate the poses of statues sculpted in our form? Or will we realise that it is they who stand frozen: imitating us.