I know I shouldn’t be, but I can’t help but feel very disappointed at how little any voices of Islamic scholarship have to say about any of the great moral issues of our times.
Whether it be the AI revolution (and all that it opens up, from debates about consciousness and the ethics around it to discussions of liability for agentic AI), to digital harms, surveillance capitalism, platform responsibility and regulation, to matters of wider government and governance in the 21st century. These include the limitations of representative democracy, accountability and ways to achieve it, centralisation vs decentralisation, outdated and evolving paradigms of justice, the ethics of markets and economies (money-printing and Modern Monetary Theory, state investment and growth, housing), globalisation and deglobalisation, degrowth, demographics and social change…
Many of these include sharp and pressing moral questions - they’re not just technocratic matters but require a normative judgement - what is right? They come from issues which emerged mostly in the last century, and are contentious and largely unresolved topics. A faqih, an Islamic legal scholar, is basically an applied ethicist, seeking to apply ethical norms to questions arising in society. But it’s startling how few scholars are applying fiqh to anything relevant and timely today. The most contemporary ethical discussions I’ve seen were around organ donation (a seven-decade-old technology) a decade ago. It’s very sad, but I can’t really conclude anything but that the tradition died. If it were alive, it would be generating new solutions to new questions, but it has stopped responding to external stimuli.
Part of this problem is a vicious cycle between Islamic scholars who have been trained in a paradigm of strictly replicating past epistemological structures and avoidance of any kind of original thought, and a Muslim public deeply suspicious of anything deviating from this. But ultimately if the thinkers are unwilling to be unpopular then they’re irrelevant.
In the discourse around AI, one of the most contentious ideas is “the singularity” - the point at which the pace of change becomes so rapid, due to recursive self-improvement of AI, that it’s impossible to forecast what lies beyond it. Like the event horizon of a black hole, it’s impossible to see past it, and once crossed, there is no return.
What lies beyond the event horizon? Will we reach post-scarcity, and render all existing economic theories obsolete? Will we cure ageing and live for hundreds or thousands of years, or upload our minds to servers where our simulacra can continue for millenia, or colonise and mine the stars, each ruling an interstellar empire of our own? It’s not even possible to imagine these things from the experience of humanity thus far.
But if you zoom out a bit more, then this is all part of one single exponential growth curve called modernity. The Islamic tradition came across its own “singularity” a long time ago - when the exponential growth and change of the modern world began. Capitalism was a recursive self-improvement machine that led to a total societal transformation which Islamic scholarship did not keep up with, rendering a world unrecognisable to any previous era. We failed to adapt and got left far behind. Maybe that irrelevance is what’s coming for all of us - institutions, ideologies and paradigms.