Sometimes I think, “I have made over 250 posts on here…isn’t that a bit indulgent?”
Other times I think, “Since 2008, I have only very occasionally used this medium to try to tease out how the Muḥammadan dispensation should be lived at every moment in the life of a 21st century citizen of the United States of America.”
From the first vantage point, silence is preferred.
From the second vantage point, I have perhaps been overly succinct.
Others have seemingly endless YouTube videos, in search of much larger numbers of listeners.
I am there too, but one video by an uncharitable critic has more views than every other video of me combined.
I would rather have one reader who understands what I am saying, and offers beneficial responses, then a million people commenting, “why u a deviant from Quraan and Sunnaah akhi?!”
I believe we live in an age closer to Idiocracy than ever before. I experience it regularly amongst Muslims.
A locus classicus for conversations between my sister and I is the essay by Susan Sontag on photography.
“But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than
photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.”
YouTube viewers literally feel like they can consume the whole world while sitting in the dark on their couch. I watched a video last night by someone who has traveled to every country on Earth, and described the 5 he liked the least! Quintessential 2020s cultural product. The world as a thing to be consumed and rated online.
I can’t even add a photo to this post to make it more palatable for clickbait Islam. Just doesn’t seem right, after what I just said.
But from the vantage point of an Islamic worldview, God could have provided us with sacred imagery. Instead God provided us with text-as-sound. The Recitation.
God could have sent a Messenger in the era of YouTube, with the demand to “like and subscribe” as the contemporary corollary to “hear and obey.” But God chose otherwise.
The word is the closest we get to God in this material realm. kun fa yakun.
Which brings me to AI.
The emergence of AI that can produce whole essays based on a simple prompt seems to challenge what many people believe is quintessentially human.
But I disagree.
Let me go back to the very first post on this medium from 2008 (damn, I’m so old now):
“Muslim scholars often say that the words of the learned and righteous are a commentary on the Qur’an and the Sunnah. I hope my words can reach such a lofty rank. I fear my words will come across as the ramblings of an ignorant and sinful man.”
Meanings are the purpose of words. That is why the English translation of the Qur’an can be the means for someone to experience Allah and accept Islam. The meanings encapsulated in the original Arabic text can be expressed partially through a completely different language. These meanings are the foundation of guidance – to know that the entire universe was created by the Creator, that the Creator sees absolutely everything in the creation, and so on.
The English translation of the Qur’an and the writings of Charles Bukowski are not comparable from an Islamic worldview. One elevates our humanity, the other is mostly the ramblings of someone lost in the darknesses that the Qur’an was revealed to dispel.
And those meanings will all be lost one day when the world comes to an end. All that will remain are the intentions of those morally responsible beings (mukallafūn) who spoke them. A good word can lead to Hellfire, just as the ḥadīth related by Muslim states:
“…You have told a lie. You acquired knowledge so that you might be called an ʿālim and you recited the Qur’an so that it might be said, ‘he is a Qāri” and such has already been said. So orders will be passed against him and he shall be dragged with his face downward and cast into the Fire.”
So speech is not the point. Even reciting the Qur’an itself is not the point.
It is something deeper.
When one looks at popular films/shows about AI, what disturbs people is not the possibility for AI to show consciousness/agency/understanding/self-awareness. Rather, they fear AI as a being not bound by a moral law.
For example, human beings created atomic weapons, which have the ability to destroy all life on planet Earth. The only thing that has restrained our usage of them is some sort of morality, however vaguely understood. Humans fear that AI would have access to nuclear weapons without the moral restraints that keep the creators of nuclear weapons from unleashing their destructive force. This is the whole premise of “The Terminator” series. The more sophisticated AI stories involve programmers trying to create some sort of internal moral coding that would keep a sentient AI being from attacking us, and (usually) AI trying to figure out a way around that restraint on its agency. “I, Robot” is a good example of this approach.
Take this verse of the Qur’an:
“The example of (calling) those who disbelieve is such as someone is shouting at an animal that hears nothing but a call and cry. They are deaf, dumb and blind, so they do not understand.” (2.171, Usmani translation)
The Qur’an centers the moral response to the existential realities of the dunyā. It is not enough to have self-awareness and intelligence – the whole purpose of Islam is to call beings with free will to voluntarily submit to Divine Guidance. And I would argue that the entirety of my 24 years of living Islam centers on whether or not I was willing to submit to Divine commands and eschew Divine prohibitions. This is even more palpable in the month of Ramadan, the greatest annual global display of surrender to the Divine in human history. This verse of the Qur’an is saying that my intellect would be judged to be deficient had I refused to surrender my sense of autonomy to the Being that brought me into existence. Fasting in the month of Ramadan is one fundamental demonstration of that surrender. Someone’s brilliance does not absolve them of a proper response to Divine Guidance.
Our fear of AI’s lack of moral restraint is a projection of our own awareness of our rebellion against our Creator. Since we know that we are making AI, we know that we are its creator [leaving aside the ontological argument that Allah is ultimately the Creator of all human creations], and we fear its rebellion from our own moral code that keeps us from destroying ourselves. We know what we are capable of, as we have witnessed the genocide of the Rohingya, the Holocaust, the pyramids of skulls built by the Mongols, the nuclear annihilation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the day of Ashura, and other utter failures of human moral restraint. But we at least still exhibit moral aversion (and also often claim moral superiority) in the face of the most egregious rebellions from moral codes, as our fiṭra (human nature) still calls us to recognize the moral fabric of our Creator’s design for this dunyā.
The promise of Allāh for the continuation of consciousness in a state of joy and pleasure is only for those who respond to the Divine moral code. For others, the Qur’an says that they will wish that they were mere dust (78.40) as opposed to retaining consciousness while experiencing the Fire.
We know that we are choosing to create AI, just the way we chose to create atomic weapons. We don’t have to. But as with so much of human history, we just can’t help ourselves. And we fear what we will create, because we have created so many horrible things before.
Unlike our words, the words that AI can speak have no inherent meaning, like the words of a parrot. And thus the deeds that AI will do will only be the moral repercussions of those who develop it and use it. AI will be destroyed along with the rest of our world, when only that unique part of ourselves in which our intentions inhere will remain as the ontological basis of our eternal destinies.
I pray, with the prayer of a completely contingent and dependent shadow, that these words find favor in the Divine Tribunal that exists beyond the earthly human condition.
They were not written by a machine coded by programmers in Silicon Valley.
They were written by flesh and blood me in Oakland, California, on a cool and sunny afternoon while my baby daughter was repeatedly trying to climb on me.
A Mercy Case on the day I was born, and A Mercy Case on the day I will die.
لا إله إلا الله
A Mercy Case 