Notes On The Hallaqian Problem and Cybernetics

The Hallaqian Problem

Ibn Maghreb

What was Wael Hallaq's message to Muslims - a curious individual - an Arab Christian who has been spending his life elaborating on the intricacies and development of fiqh whilst dabbling in philosophy from time to time (for example his work on Ibn Taymiyyah and the Greek logicians)? Hallaq writes in his seminal work the Impossible State that Muslims engaged in the political struggle made the mistake of assuming the ''state'' was a blank canvas, a type of neutral tool that could be used and put to work towards an entirely different set of goals and priorities. Hallaq makes the point that as a product of the Enlightenment, it has its own set of metaphysics that create downstream economic, psychological, moral and philosophical effects that ultimately fashion and create a particular type of subject - the ''citizen''. The citizen is primarily motivated by materialist considerations enshrined in the architecture of the State - utilitarian, secular, profane and it exerts its writ through coercion and ultimately violence without recourse to authority that is outside its bonds and machinery.

The creation of this agent - the citizen is the starkest contrast between the nation-state and what Hallaq argues has been the historical collective experience of Islamicate polities - which he describes here:

The paradigmatic Muslim homo economicus seeks wealth and profit but remains materially and psychologically committed to social responsibility, as is abundantly evidenced in twelve centuries of Islamic socioeconomic history. Honor, prestige, nearness to God, and the love and respect of family and neighbor all paradigmatically intersect with this ethic of indebtedness to one’s own community. As everything is owned by the Ultimate Sovereign, wealth and profit are not possessed by or destined for only the rich. They are made “from” and “for the sake of the Ultimate Sovereign,” whose Rights are identical with those of the rights of the poor and unprivileged. In this equation, the poor are integral to God, and He is integral to them. Serve them, and you serve God; serve God, and you serve them. Produced by the state and pushed, though willingly, into a brute world of economic competition and profit, the modern subject is one who will find the true Muslim homo economicus a curiosity and an aberration, something belonging to the museum of extinct species. Raised on the moral technologies of the self and imbued with a mild form of asceticism, the Muslim homo economicus would similarly regard his modernist counterpart as irrational, greedy, shortsighted, and selfish—in short, a brute. The oppositions between the two and their utter incompatibility are nothing short of staggering.

The Hallaqian problem is thus: Capture of the cold hard machinery of the State, the ability to monopolise violence and the authority it secures may look like victory but in the long run because of the inherent secularity and genealogical indebtedness to the Enlightenment project and subsequent Euro-American iterations till present day you will end up creating not moral subjects bound by fiqh, tassawuf and orientated towards taqwa but modernist automatons.

The Hallaqian problem is one of pyrrhic victory - consumed and enveloped by what was thought to be a tool rather than a living, breathing, organic philosophical project. I now want to extend this further by dwelling on the nature of the State - how it evolved from the 20th century to the present day.

Seeing Like A State

To simplify the Hallaqian problem stop seeing the State as just a tool - an inert entity but rather view it as a type of malignant festering organism capable of mutation, change and adaptation and this malignancy persists no matter which ideological apparatus tries to capture it - be it your ''tribe'' or your adversary's tribe. With this mindset imagine the vision of such an organism - what it sees, what it can do with this sight and how pervasive this sight can be. We are now in the realm of a type of divinity-creation project - religion-building if you will where the State assumes the Qibla of all things.

The creation of such an organism was brought forth by souls that envisioned a particular type of world, motivated by a certain ethos. David Harvey I believe his work captures this sentiment - ''high modernism'' which he describes succinctly as:

"The belief 'in linear progress, absolute truths, and rational planning of ideal social orders' under standardized conditions of knowledge and production was particularly strong. The modernism that resulted was, as a result, 'positivistic, technocratic, and rationalistic' at the same time as it was imposed as the work of an elite avant-garde of planners, artists, architects, critics, and other guardians of high taste. The 'modernization' of European economies proceeded apace, while the whole thrust of international politics and trade was justified as bringing a benevolent and progressive 'modernization process' to a backward Third World"

This tyrannical social engineering is the work of revolutionary progressive elites of the 20th century and in their wake lies littered bodies and much spilt innocent blood. These utopian aspirations necessarily required a malignant parasite such as the modern nation-state. Without the State, these aspirations could not even be delivered - the scale, scope and pervasiveness of such social engineering are otherwise not logistically possible. The aim of this was ultimately to control Nature - to allow the State to fashion citizens that would be geared towards the exploitation of Nature for profit and ''progress''.

Here I want to move specifically mention the Islamic art of law-making as held by the traditional class of jurists which was not to create new cultural communities or technologies but rather sift through the existing cultural apparatus - the customs, the habits of heart and mind, the organizational rubric of existing societies - and use a variety of ingenious legal methodologies based around Quranic and Prophetic injunctions as ''sieve'' to do this. In stark contrast, the children of the Enlightenment in the 20th century - the progressive revolutionary elites and we can count the Shah of Iran for instance as a case study, sought to create new cultural communities overnight. Ataturk for instance created essentially a new language overnight and thus plunging an entire major substrate of Islamic civilisation into illiteracy overnight condemning it forever (or so it would seem) to cultural and historical amnesia. To create new cultural communities meant to view said communities as objects to be studied and ultimately of course to be deconstructed and dismantled. Both the Shah and Ataturk saw themselves as heroes of their story and their motivations were to ensure that their people would not be left behind as the rest of the world industrialized. If new communities, identities and even languages were required to catch up with the rest of the world then so be it.

C.S Lewis remarks with typical candour that:

The real thing is that this time we're going to get science applied to social problems and backed by the whole force of the state, just as war has been backed by the whole force of the state in the past

The past is thus a crutch that must be broken, it has little of value - the common folk would be told that it is best forgotten as it is the cause of much embarrassment and humiliation. However, I suspect the real fear is what the past can do to invigorate broken and trodden down people - it can serve as a reminder ironically of how things could be. Particularly, when it seems the State guided and channelled by a class of bureaucrats and technocrats seems to regard its citizens with at best an appalling apathy and at worse a destructive narcissism that seeks to refashion them from the inside out.

The specific elements required - the pillars to bring such a monstrosity to reality have been articulated brilliantly by James Scott. These four elements which he mentions can be summarised as follows:

1. The administrative ordering of nature and society - imposing concepts of citizenship, and welfare, creating the tools of statecraft itself - the way it colonises the populace by creating new structures, particularly through the deployment of new financial instruments and structures
2. High-modernist ideology which we have alluded to already
3. Now Scott mentions the third element as a probabilistic condition - an authoritarian state willing to use coercion - I feel this element is baked into 1 and 2 - it is part of the first two pillars
4. Creating a compliant civil society - a collection of subservient non-state actors that feign independence - NGOs, the media, civil society, polite society - the apparently educated and intelligent credientialist automatons that spread the Gospel of the State whilst adopting a ''critical posture''

Once one believes reality can be summed up in data, that the grand richness and complexity of life can be boiled down to simple arithmetic then it emboldens and stirs hubris in the souls of men who believe like a quadratic equation, society can simply be remade anew. Indeed, when one believes that all the data flowing into view from the administrative harvesters must be acted upon without question then it becomes a moral obligation to do so - to march towards the promise of Progress. This can be done through ''persuasion'' (propaganda), psychological operations or of course through coercive violence.

Cybernetics

Nicholas Guilhot has an insightful paper mulling over the legacy of Schmitt. I particularly find his coining of the term ''Hobbesian Cybernetics" compelling. However, why should one bother with cybernetics altogether?

Cybernetics is not just a particularly advanced form of technology; it is a form of technology that is very close to politics. In several respects, cybernetic systems are like state machineries and operate as if someone were making decisions: They neutralize conflicts internally; they respond to an external environment on the basis of a preexisting orientation; they strive for survival; and they seem to generate decisions.

Technology has the potential to strip away and dilute political deliberation over important decisions. It has relegated the most important discussions about the key questions of the day to technocratic participants shrouding itself under a language of opaque technical-speak and bureaucratic gibberish. It is here that for all their ethical transgressions the anarchists were correct in positing that the "liberal hypothesis" has been supplanted by the "cybernetic hypothesis". I would argue though that we are still living in the twilight of the liberal hypothesis - perhaps the dying embers of it as the cybernetic age looms large which I believe will be made much more feasible and possible by locking citizens into AI-determined ecosystems created by large monopolistic technological corporations acting in seamless and harmonious concert with governments. It is only the creation of new AI technologies that will truly allow for cybernetics to flourish and eclipse the liberal project. In our age the technical-speak will be hidden behind algorithm constructed and created by faceless teams on behest of large technological corporations that have unexamined and largely uncontested agendas whilst adopting a public persona of benevolence.

As Tiquun describes the fundamental difference between the liberal and cybernetic hypotheses:

It’s no longer a question of removing the subject from the traditional exterior bonds, as the liberal hypothesis had intended, but of reconstructing the social bonds by depriving the subject of all substance. Each person was to become a fleshless envelope, the best possible conductor of social communication, the locus of an infinite feedback loop which is made to have no nodes. The cyberneticization process thus completes the “process of civilization,” to where bodies and their emotions are abstracted within the system of symbols. “In this sense,” writes Lyotard, “the system presents itself as an avant-garde machine that drags humanity along after it, by dehumanizing it so as to rehumanize it at another level of normative capacities. Such is the great pride of the deciders, such is their blindness… Even any permissiveness relative to the various games is only granted on the condition that greater performance levels will be produced. The redefinition of the norms of life consists in an amelioration of the skills of the system in matters of power

To put it more bluntly, whilst the classical liberal project intended to ''liberate'' man from the shackles of embeddedness by installing new myths - what many such as Patrick Deenan and others have failed to consider is that liberal cultures are not solely deconstructive. They are generative and productive in the sense they create new tribal allegiances, new religions and myths for people to congregate around - and in doing so new communities are built.

There is decay only in so far as pre-existing community structures are eroded but this does not mean the absence of community structures in principle. This was never the goal of the liberal hypothesis - the Shah of Iran and Ataturk wished to recreate civilization anew along communal and identitarian lines but with different contours. The worry is that the cybernetic hypothesis shatters physical communities altogether without providing a replacement and instead offering the solace and refuge of the All-Seeing Planner - the Cybernetic State - a form of control that would bypass the "civil society" intermediaries that Scott discusses. This creates a set of 'objectively' controllable social mechanisms. This requires another leap in technology that perhaps we are now heading towards in the next few years.

GAMAM Aqeedah - Surveillance Capitalism

The rupture between the liberal hypothesis and the cybernetic hypothesis is the one which we are currently living amidst. The transition will be insidious and incremental and at present the transition is being ushered in under the custodianship of the prevailing technological quintumvirate - GAMAM - (Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple and Microsoft). GAMAM at present is busy harnessing AI technologies to accelerate the data harvesting process - the process which will make cybernetic governance possible and feasible. How did GAMAM convince entire populations transcending boundaries of creed, civilization, race and culture to give up their data? In exchange for the trivial, the illusory, convenience and distraction. The GAMAM aqeedah is proto-cybernetic - although not directly responsible for "citizens" as such nor directly in control of policy (although they lobby fiercely) they can use the data they have acquired to perfect, optimize and calibrate their technological ecosystems - deserts of digital delusion to lock people in whilst parting with what makes them unique.

Why to add the qualifying ''surveillance'' to capitalism at all - what value does it serve? Smith and later Hayek had a mystical fascination with markets - sensing their mechanisms were never truly knowable - that there was a mechanism at play that could offer a sense of fairness to those who participated in it. Surveillance capitalism inverses this ideal - companies now know everything about us, where we have been, whom we spend time with, what we discuss, what we read etc. They have access to a type of knowledge that Smith and Hayek could not even fathom and based on this absolute knowledge run their operations. It has also commodified human experience in totality - whereas land, labour and money are subject to imperfect systems of legislative control, there is not even an attempt at mounting a similar legislative barrier when it comes to human behaviour and experience.

As Zuboff explains:

Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as “machine intelligence,” and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions that I call behavioral futures markets.

The Hallaqian 20th-century State sought to control nature - nature was the raw material - the earth, the trees, the rivers - and this yielded particular byproducts that fashioned a new subject - the citizen. It was this imperative to mastery that created the 20th-century State.

The 21st-century State no longer has such tame ambitions to control nature alone - it will now seek to control human nature directly, unmediated. This move from nature to humans captures the twilight age of the liberal hypothesis as we move towards the cybernetic hypothesis.

Towards Iqballian Cypherpunk Ethics

This essay was a long reflection on extending and calibrating the Hallaqian problem for our time and for the time to come. I believe there is a possible way out. It will involve synthesizing the poetic philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal and his fierce insistence on the Self - this idea of Khudi and marrying it with elements and aspects of the Cypherpunk movement that emerged in the early 90s and has recently seen a renaissance with the arrival of Bitcoin. The idea is that cryptographic/encryption based technologies are a way of reversing the Digital Panoptican by restoring digital and data sovereignty to the individual once more. I think cryptography is in part a compelling answer to algorithmic tyranny and overall a solution to the Hallaqian Problem as adapted to the 21st century State.

When Balaji wrote in the Network State:

After the financial deplatforming of Western proles and foreign elites, of Canadian truckers and 145M Russians, it’s clear that digital finance is a weapon of war.

He is flat-out wrong. It was not because of a band of desperate Canadian truckers that allowed Western elites to experiment with finance as a weapon of war. Muslim countries and individuals have been subject to financial warfare and surveillance capitalism for more than two decades, perhaps even longer. For example, the ad-hoc sanctioning of Muslim states perceived to be a threat to American primacy in a particular sphere of influence. Or perhaps the rapid and grotesque expansion of the surveillance and intelligence sectors - often supra-state institutions - private entities that acted beyond the supposed writ of the State let loose on Muslims - imprisoning them without due process and subjecting them to undefined internment and torture. Then there is legislative warfare first with the Patriot Act and its offspring in the central colonies of the American Empire - (PREVENT in the UK) which has now escalated to the Restrict Act. Let us also not forget the hounding of the Muslim charity sector particularly in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It is not these Canadian truckers who were the canary in the mine - but Muslims.

The last two decades of Muslim advocacy - the attempts to legislate safeguards in fundamentally broken pseudo-democratic systems that are transitioning from liberal coercion to cybernetic coercion were always destined to fail. These systems cannot be rehabilitated from within. To escape Burnham's "Computer State" there must be a wholesale embrace of cryptography and elements of the cypherpunk manifesto - but grounding it in an Iqballian ethic that focuses on the flourishing of the Islamic Self - the idea of Khudi. Burnham wrote that the fundamental battle will be over privacy:

Two years ago, in a speech before the Union League Club of New York City, Charles D. Ferris, then the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, tried to alter the public perception about the value of personal privacy. “The fundamental problem I see with the coming information age,” he warned, is that it “will rob us of one of our more important rights in a free society, the right to privacy.” When American families are wired for two-way television and its ancillary services, he went on, “a computer will have a record of what they buy and how much they spend. It will know whether they pay their bills quickly, slowly or not at all, and it will know where their money comes from. It will know whether they watched the debates or the football game or a controversial movie. It will know when they came home the previous night (and probably in what condition, depending on how many alarms they accidentally set off). It will know how many people are in their houses and in what rooms. In other words, it will know more about them than anyone should.”

It is on this crucial part of privacy which is the key question to all things in this age - the key to personal authenticity, dignity, custodianship and from an Islamic perspective - privacy is what can and should allow us to fully realise our place as custodians of this world where I end. I have briefly discussed related topics about privacy and dataism which may help understand the next piece.

The next part will try to fully envisage this Iqballian Cyperpunk Ethics. I will focus on the salient aspects of Allama Iqbal's poetic philosophy and more broadly consider the place of privacy and the notion of an Islamic Self in Sufic literature whilst considering how the Cypherpunk Manifesto is a response to the Dostoevskian dilemma. I consider whether such a synthesis is possible or even desirable. Anarchism is an anathema to mainstream contemporary Sunni scholarship and something I agree with. Perhaps though, in the decentralised nature of Sunni constructions of authority lie the seeds for the potential synthesis of particular elements.

It will also honestly consider how such an ethic may never be truly viable as Muslims evolve their own technocratic and cybernetic systems that deliver an efficient and seductive peace offering prosperity and stability - focusing namely on the stunning successes of the GCC bloc over the last few years that would shortchange any such cryptographic endeavour by placing in front of the Muslim a type of Islamo-Technocratic regime with monarchical aesthetics.

There is one clear elephant in the room that I have purposefully avoided in this piece. The global financial fiat-based system and its incoherencies and unsustainability. Such a consideration is beyond my scope but it is an incredibly weighty one and I strongly encourage everyone to read and listen to authors who are tackling this very important dimension.

Feedback is welcome, particularly criticism. For a long time, I feel that Muslims have dealt with the Hallaqian Problem as it was originally formulated without using it as a foundation to focus on the problems to come. It struck me essentially as just a long postmortem about classical Islamism - a necessary postmortem but one that I felt had overstayed its welcome. What I found even more depressing was the conclusion of some that by learning the Hallaqian Problem one could create an Islamism 2.0 - which is the worst conclusion one could take from his work.

I think it is now high time we bring the Hallaqian problem into direct conversation with other projects that share the same apprehensions and concerns. I hope this is just the start. I hope we think of new ways beyond sterile political advocacy as ''protected minorities'' in a fundamentally broken system.

And truly God alone knows best.

Bibliography

• Hallaq, W. B. (2014). The impossible state: Islam, politics, and modernity’s moral predicament. Columbia University Press.
• Zygmunt Bauman. (2000). Modernity and the Holocaust. Cornell University Press.
• Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity : an enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Wiley-Blackwell.
• Lewis, C. S. (1945). That hideous strength. Harper Collins.
• Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press.
• Guilhot, N. (2020). Automatic Leviathan: Cybernetics and politics in Carl Schmitt’s postwar writings. History of the Human Sciences, 33(1), 128–146. https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695119864244
• Tiqqun. (n.d.). _The Cybernetic Hypothesis. Retrieved April 29, 2023, from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-the-cybernetic-hypothesis.pdf
• Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs.
• Srinivasan, B. (n.d.). The Network State. https://book.thenetworkstate.com/tns.pdf