Futuwwa¹ was not merely an abstraction detached from the concerns of the physical realm beholden only to other-worldly personal acts of spiritual excellence. Futuwwa was grounded into the political economy of the Islamicate, weaved in with the guilds, taverns, trading routes and vital organs of commerce of the day. It was in the commercial realm that futuwwa was allowed to flourish as an avenue for Muslim men to combine the twin tasks of taming both the nafs and dunya². Futuwwa in many ways by permeating through the economic and technical activities of pre-modern Islamicate life was technocosmic³.

Without an independent political economy to anchor the spiritual forms of the Islamicate, these arts and fields started to wither and slowly die - eclipsed by rival civilizational paradigms. Futuwwa and tasawwuf retreated from the physical realm, from the engine rooms of commerce, political economy trying to salvage some new role in the postcolonial vassal clients of the Islamicate corpse.

In trying to find a space for itself in the post-colonial Islamicate, it has created a great deal of disillusionment amongst the faithful, with Muslim governments acting as proxies for hostile enemies bureaucratizing and now dictating the contours, formation and even substance of religious discourse. The price otherwise is to languish in the pit of the rulers' prisons.

The ongoing Gaza Genocide has prompted me to think more deeply about civilizational forms such as the waqf, futuwwa, tasawwuf and the way fiqh provided the guard-rails for these foundations of Islamicate Sovereignty. It should be of no surprise that with the ongoing Gaza Genocide, several non-Muslim authors, personalities and bloggers have created sprawling media empires banking on the pro-Palestinian sympathies of global Muslim audiences. These individuals have created large and elaborated enterprises that no doubt have also hoovered up much financial goodwill from Muslims all over the world as they couple their advocacy with a plethora of digital begging bowls.

What is even more damning is that many of these personalities have been the same people building their media brands on the back of Assad's brutalities in Syria backed by Iran's neo-Khomeinist agenda of Twelver Supremacism. Many of the advocates within the Palestinian digital bowl begging space have simply ignored, turned a blind eye or actively encouraged the destruction of what was left of a Sunni civilizational sphere in the Levant.

The Muslim "attention economy" is a lucrative adventure that invites charlatans, frauds and grifters of all political persuasion - all of whom are looking to capitalise on a glaring absence of competent Muslim social and cultural formation in the post-Caliphial era. Muslims en-masse have been happy to part with their capital, data and even emotional allegiances to such frauds simply because the elaborate network of waqf, tasawwuf, futuwwa is no longer a functioning and organic entity.

It should be clear and obvious that reviving such things on top of a hostile and inherently Lahabite financial system under the auspices of Global American Empire (GAE) is simply a non-starter, particularly the future trajectory of GAE hyper-financialization which is intending to completely corrode and decimate any semblance of financial privacy and autonomy with the coming advent of CBDCs.

There is amidst all this a nagging feeling amongst all Muslims conversant with the themes I've mentioned so far, to try and turn the clock - to "go back". Back to gold. Back to the Caliph's Dinar. Back to monetary and fiscal forms taken from the last epoch when Islamicate Sovereignty was plain for all to see. This is tempting but simply no longer possible. The material strength of pre-modern and gunpowder era Islamicate empires has been made obsolete, it has been eclipsed by new forms as Technology marches on. Every generation is faced with this question of Technology - how we negotiate it, how we answer it will create new material forms and structures from which new spiritual understandings are generated.

Industrial Civilization for many it seems across the political spectrum seems to be the sensible and pragmatic answer to hyper-financialization i.e. what Hudson describes as "Super-Imperialism"⁴ - a financial system that is anchored on the infinite capacity of debt creation of the world's premier superpower.

Yet, Industrial Civilization too is a nostalgic plea for while there is still time to industrialise, compete and fight back, it too will perhaps be eclipsed in time by some new form of Technology that as of yet has not fully emerged. The Hyperdigital at present is an all out war between total Panoptic Surveillance and all those who do not wish to have Life itself taken by the Machine.

Bitcoin Futuwwa is an area for potential exploration and excavation. The main appeal for a Muslim looking into Bitcoin is two-fold - first it has inherently anti-Riba properties baked into its protocol and second its a monetary network that can exist outside the purview of American Empire. Unlike Bitcoin Maximalists, my interest in Bitcoin is what it can do for Muslims that is not currently possible in the absence of an anchor Islamicate civilizational state when we are all compelled to use the financial instruments of American Empire. Just as in the past futuwwa was realised through guilds, associations and tariqas plugged into the heart of premodern commerce and trade, so to perhaps new forms of this underlying principle can spring in the digital realm with Bitcoin as the anchor. Bitcoin offers potentially a more reliable anchor than the broken systems of nation-state bureaucracy, fickle and cruel Islamicate praetorian guards and the financial structures of American Empire (IMF, WTO etc).

More interestingly, Bitcoin's ultimate purpose I feel has not yet been revealed. I do not think it will ultimately function as a layer for payment settlement or become equivalent or analogous to the US dollar (or any national/international currency) because that assumes the rest of the fundamental underlying principles of the current American Imperial financial model will remain intact as it stands beyond this century. Much more likely is the creation of a permissioned hyper-surveillance CBDC with Bitcoin aesthetics to make it more palatable.

Cryptography will ultimately be an anchor against the digital mirage and desert - it will help us distinguish truth from falsehood, and ultimately Bitcoin's greatest strength is its elegance in being a masterpiece of cryptographic architecture of which currency is just one possible use-case. It is the tool to help evade the Panopticon of the State. Sound and encrypted communication, testimony, witness, trust, proving what is illusory, what is real - this may very well be what Bitcoin fundamentally proves to be invaluable for in new iterations of the protocol in the decades to come.

Islam is built upon truthful transmission, testimony with integrity, witness through sound character and good manners, verification of what is the Haqq and what is Baatil - surely the Ishmaelite of all peoples must be at the forefront at trying to grasp the Real amidst the Digital Desert that will surely and inevitably consume and overwhelm our faculties.

It is in this vein I must reference Lowery's work on Softwar⁵. This striking passage I must share:

Go to practically any popular website today and look at the comments section; you’ll probably see many fake comments posted by many fake accounts, upvoted to the top of the page by many fake likes, all produced by computer programs (bots) or a small percentage of the population, often orchestrated by people trying to affect behavior or influence people’s perception of reality. Part of the reason why this type of systemic exploitation of cyberspace is possible is because of how computationally efficient computers plugged into the internet have become; there’s essentially no physical or marginal cost required to change the states of state machines or to send these control signals.
In the real world, people can’t sustain attacks like these because they simply aren’t powerful enough. The real world has severe physical limitations and physical opportunity costs. In the current version of cyberspace, there are no such physical limitations. This could change if websites were to adopt electrocyber domes. They could create a physically constrained area of cyberspace where they would be protected from belligerent actors who routinely exploit cyberspace’s lack of physical constraints. It would be possible to make it too physically expensive for belligerent actors to continue their malevolent operations on these websites, while simultaneously keeping costs low enough to preserve honest people’s ability to use these services. By applying miniscule, superfluous physical constraints to actions taken online could dramatically reduce the level of systemic exploitation and abuse currently plaguing the internet. Everything from email spam to state-sponsored weaponized misinformation could theoretically be physically constrained using proof-of-power wall APIs and electro-cyber domes.

By building Bitcoin Waqfs we are not only potentially banking on its monetary properties but also could create physical safeguards and constraints that can protect the new Digital Islamicate against the encroaching Desert and hostile actors because cyber-malevolence would finally have a physical constraint. Like Lowery suggests we have perhaps mistakenly thought of Satoshi's protocol as a monetary triumph rather than a triumph of security:

However, as Bitcoin adoption scales, it also appears to be increasingly misunderstood as exclusively a monetary system rather than a physical security system which could be used to secure any type of information. This might be because Bitcoin’s inventor was famously terse with the protocol’s design specifications and famously disinclined to expand upon its potential functionality as more than just money. Nakamoto orphaned the project shortly after releasing it, so the overwhelming majority of what has been written about Bitcoin is purely speculation. There is not a lot of academic literature which explores the potential for this technology to serve as something other than a monetary network.

The protocol is more than just Bitcoin - it is as Lowery would contend energy and ultimately Bitpower. Whether such a protocol can help revive new forms of futuwwa remains to be seen.

However, a very immediate short-term reorientation of priorities is necessary. Primarily, that the era of digital bowl begging content creation and advocacy pioneered by the most parasitic and opportunistic personalities simply must cease. Muslim advocacy must find a way of combining advocacy with creating and bring into fruition a digital network-state. This requires Muslims to break free from working in silos, and start communicating in a cross-field and anti-disciplinary fashion. Anti-disciplinary is necessary because at present dialogue, debate and discussion is constrained by arbitrary epistemic borders rather than the dictated by necessity and need.

Instead of trying to perfect the influencer-model of digital bowl begging which the sages of the Sufic past would have eschewed and baulked at, there has to be a socially conscious attempt to stop seeing influencer-advocacy as a way of personally enriching oneself. It should be a taboo to earn a living from digital content - instead, digital content creation should channel the passions and energies of the Muslim Attention Economy into raising funds for protocol development for an Islamicate Network State by bringing in domain experts from appropriate fields into conversation with one another but also communally funding said projects. Bitcoin payments to Muslim developers who are genuinely interested in building civilizational software on strong and universal protocols that are primed towards longevity is a possible route.

What this means practically is instead of Patreon and other such "donation" technologies that are meant to benefit the author alone, there could be Bitcoin Lightning addresses that point towards charities, genuine communal initiatives not just in software development but the arts too. Through these interactions perhaps will emerge Bitcoin Futuwwa.

These are preliminary thoughts in their embryonic stage, but this time feels strange as we if we are on the cusp of great transformation and in that lies opportunity. The last ten years or so have been utterly disillusioning and disappointing in the hopes of having a civilizational anchor state. The only conclusion to take from this, is that at present our generation must form associations and patterns of institutional governance and custodianship that are outside the purview of the State. Cryptography as the base-layer for a networked civilizational space for orphaned Muslims seems like a sensible avenue to explore. The purpose ultimately of this piece is to start having conversations to move away from influencer-digital bowl begging and Dawah Inc.

And God knows best

Footnotes