Notes On Dawah Inc

Redemption preserves itself in a small crack in the continuum of catastrophe. ¹

Ibn Maghreb

The Problem

Islamic apologetics evolved steadily on the back of trailblazing personalities such as Ahmed Deedat and Dr. Zakir Naik. This came at a time of evolving political projects of state-capture by Islamist actors across the Islamicate – think about the Iranian experiment, when Deedat was at the heights of his powers and a master of his craft.

Islamic political projects globally speaking have always suffered from abysmal media organization and representation, but with Deedat and later Naik this would be reversed using broad and maximalist definitions of ''Dawah'' and in doing so they created digital empires of Islamic representation. Not to get bogged down into the complexities of Arabic semantics and grammar, but Dawah is essentially the act of being witness to the Truth of Islam and spreading it far and wide.

The first iteration of Dawah Inc – the exercise of injecting modern advertising techniques, utilizing modern/conventional media forms to communicate and interact with audiences was largely hailed as a massive success by the Islamic chattering classes and even the cognitive elites (Islamic ulema, political leaders etc.). With Deedat passing, Naik took on the torch and with the establishment of his media empire – Peace TV, created a global institute of Islamic communications that would usher in a professional battery of motivational speaker types that would tour the globe. This also created the regional and international networks of Islamic activism that would bleed into politics and social activism – moving beyond dialectic arguments about prooving the existence of God or debating the finer intricacies of the Cosmological Argument. To be fair, Naik should be credited in creating a professionalized media class, but what happens in a few decades down the line, particularly in the context of progessively dysfunctional political spheres in the Islamicate and rapidly evolving technology is another matter altogether.

I believe it is in Britain that the exploits of Deedat and Naik have been manipulated into a far more sinister affair – DawahMan, the Hijab and co. dawah institutions, Muslim red-pilled commentators, political activists particularly from a Labour background – all have built distinct media fiefdoms that have plunged the spiritual and cognitive health of the Muslim faithful in utter decay.

Cognitive Apathy

Part of this sickness is creating a type of cognitive apathy because of the overwhelming fluff and chaotic mediocrity from incessant Islamic reminder channels and polemics. Seneca despite not living in the age of Shaykh Google gives a far more eloquent expression to this problem:

Look back in memory and consider...how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!²

Cognitive apathy dulls the senses, the insights, and intuitions bestowed upon us by the Creator. It is a dull anesthetic agent that creates seals upon seals on the heart, only to find life in the cacophony of polemic and outrage that peppers and punctuates the cynical algorithmic considerations of holier than thou content creators. Now everyone adopts the moniker ''student of knowledge'' as a type of professional license to pontificate on manufactured controversies with an air of erudition because they have a podcast, a YouTube channel, affiliate links and sponsorships. These activities you must understand are linked to a particular conception of Progress.

Progress – the spirituality of Dataism

Content creators are obsessed with analytics, monitoring traffic, graphing likes, shares, subscription numbers as cardinal indicators of the vitality of their projects. And Islamic content creators are no exception. The use and participation of data collection to extract some sort of magical formula from the numbers to keep the attention economy running is a hopelessly secular exercise, but one that underpins even ''religious'' content creation.

What is curious however is that the high priests of Dataism - the founders, creators, CEOs of tech madrassas like Google, Facebook, or Microsoft adopt a Luddite attitude to these technologies when it comes to the question of raising their own children. Jobs and Gates would be condemned as draconian by most laissez-faire parents. Make no mistake, even if the supposed topic of discussion is ''Islam'' – the consideration and orientation is entirely pragmatic and ultimately materialist. The result is one wanders a landscape that is ultimately wounded and ill. Although not apparent on the surface, it is there nonetheless. One can turn to Aldo Leopold, a conservationist who has a great turn of phrase to describe this situation:

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise³

Monocultural Capture

Deedat and Naik were brilliant in articulating a particularly Islamic discourse – it was peculiar in the sense that it required a basic willingness to be initiated into an Islamic moral framework that burdens the nafs with certain preconditions and boundaries. However, it was universal in so far as it wished to appeal to members beyond their own communities and indeed welcome outsiders into the fold. What has happened now, particularly with a new brand of Islamic red-pill content creators is monocultural capture. The contours of discussion are broadly aligned with non-Muslim/mainstream audiences. Why should I listen to the RedMahdi when I can listen to any number of mainstream RP podcasters who broadly share the same concerns, same recommendations, same moral outlook and same conceptions of human nature? What is uniquely “Islamic”? What is peculiar? What is strange? What requires initiation and learning?

If Islamic content creators are now sounding like their non-Muslim counterparts in terms of presentation, tone, priority, delivery etc.c then Dawah Inc is not only a slave to Dataism but also now colonized by the Monoculture. Monocultural capture is now an insidious problem in Islamic spaces.

The Way Forward

What is the way out of the attention economy – to escape Dataism and ultimately the spiritual fruits of Progress? Underlying this metastatic syndrome is ultimately greed and ego. Primarily, the notion of an attention economy naturally leads to a scenario where everything is framed as a transaction – there are consumers, producers, there is revenue, there is profit, there is “optimization”. The great heresy that has been peddled is that one can simply make a living out of churning out polemics – that is indeed a way of doing business in the word, a means of securing income.

Deedat started out as an ''hobbyist'' – an ''amateur''. Hobbyists and amateurs bring to the table a sense of passion, vitalism, child-like wonder and commitment that can eclipse that of the now salaried bureaucrats of the dreaded Algorithm. There is a type of digital maximalism – everything must be shared on as many platforms with as much ''collaboration''—as much exposure, as much of an audience etc.

We must choose platforms that value privacy above all else. The first casualty of the Algorithm is robbing us of dignity – dignity that is premised on privacy. The popular platforms of the Algorithm are not free – you pay with them with your time (addiction), privacy (data collection), your heart (addicted to gossip, backbiting, and polemics) – indeed the price considerably higher than any sum of money. The Algorithm operates on the idea that we are all naked, atomistic entities that will freely trade in our heart, soul, mind, and privacy for the use of a supposedly “free” service. This must change.

The ''attention economy'' must be broken and dismantled when it comes to Islamic discourse. We must revive the idea that the discussion of the religion is for (as the Persian poets like Hafez and Rumi elaborated) the ''lovers of God'' and yet combine that with Ibn Atallah's notion that one must be the above and beyond the need of people. That scholastic, intellectual activity be it hobbyist or professional (ulema) should be done with an audience where there is no financial consideration. That one is not dependent on an audience to have an income. We must revive the idea that one must have a real living in the world in the form of service, and that discourse is a separate entity altogether.

If privacy is the way forward then we must compromise somewhere and ultimately wishing for a more privacy orientated and dignified discourse will require a less ''connected'' ecosystem with fewer features. Digital minimalism must be part of post-modern tasawwuf.

We must pay with money to live in the Digital Age rather than sacrifice our hearts, minds and souls.

And God Knows Best