DoubleTake Podcast
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S2E11 - Smartphones are Hijacking our Spirituality | DoubleTake
Modern technology has made it easier than ever to instantly connect with a world far bigger than our local neighborhoods. It’s given us the opportunity to learn, work, and keep up with our loved ones no matter where we are, and in the midst of a global pandemic, this has been a blessing for a lot of people.
However, the smartphone era has also introduced new challenges to our spirituality that we aren’t always aware of. Are smartphones tools that we can use to our benefit, or are they designed to be harmful? What are the spiritual consequences of our over-reliance on social media and modern technology? What can we do to mitigate the harms of technology as we strive to connect with God? I
n this episode, host Mohamad Zaoud talks to Dr. Zara Khan, author of the Yaqeen Institute paper, “Taking Account of Tech: Fulfilling Our Personhood in the Smartphone Era.”
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Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. Assalamualaikum wa rahmatullah. Modern technology has made it easier than ever to instantly connect with a world far bigger than our local neighborhoods. It's given us the opportunity to learn, work and keep up with our loved ones no matter where they are. And in the midst of a global pandemic, this has been a blessing for a lot of people. However, the smartphone era has also introduced new challenges to our spirituality that we aren't always aware of. What are the spiritual consequences of our over-reliance on social media and modern technology? What can we do to mitigate the harms of technology as we strive to connect with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala? Welcome to a new episode of Double Take, a podcast by Yaqeen Institute about the questions and ideas around Islam and Muslims that give us pause. Remember to subscribe and rate the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. It makes a huge difference. Also consider sharing your thoughts directly with our team using the link in the description below. Let us know what you like, dislike and what you'd like to see more of. I'm Mohammed Zahed and today we're exploring how modern technology like smartphones and social media are affecting our spirituality. My guest Dr. Zahra Khan is the author of the Yaqeen Institute paper, Taking Account of Tech, Fulfilling Our Personhood in the Smartphone Era. Dr. Zahra is a senior research fellow in contemporary thought and politics at Yaqeen Institute. She studied political science and social justice at the City University of New York, specializing in comparative political philosophy and critical theory. Her main hope is to contribute to the
Islamicization of knowledge in education, politics, culture and economics. Enjoy the episode. Dr. Zahra, Salam alaikum and welcome to Double Take. Wa alaikum salam, thank you for having me. Our topic is about modern technology and smartphones and alhamdulillah for them because we're using this to connect and speak about today's topic. So Jazakallah khair. Dr. Zahra, a few months ago we were planning a Double Take season one episode and we were debating how much we wanted to mention COVID-19 because we were coming to the tail end of the pandemic. We're now recording this in December 2021 and it's still not entirely over but more than enough time has passed for us to reflect on how COVID has changed us. One of the things it highlighted is our increased reliance on technology and smartphones for our school, work, personal lives and everything in between and things are changing pretty quickly like Facebook recently changed their name to Meta and they're building what they're calling the Metaverse, a virtual world that they want people to spend even more time in. So this trend seems like it's here to stay and on one hand it's great that we have technology to do podcasts like this to allow us to continue our lives despite an ongoing pandemic and it seems like it's a tool that we can choose to use for good. But on the other hand, many studies and documentaries such as the Social Dilemma that released this year show that today's technology is actually designed to be harmful and so as someone who is dedicated to studying and analyzing contemporary thought and culture, I'd like to know where you stand on the issue of modern technology and smartphones. Are we getting addicted to smartphones and are they hurting us more than they're benefiting us? Yeah, no,
that's the question, right? That's the question that strikes at the heart of this issue and you're absolutely right to point out the benefits of our smartphones of being connected to the internet. I was able to teach last year over the internet for the first time. I've always taken a stand against online courses but if it wasn't for the online platform, I would not have been able to teach the classes that I did. Same for my husband. My kids went to school remotely, otherwise I would have been homeschooling them at home. So you are absolutely correct to point out the many benefits that this technology does in fact offer us, especially in a time of a pandemic. That being said, I definitely, you know, I can only present my own perspective here based on what I've experienced and what I've studied and I do think that the harm can outweigh the benefit at many points in our lives and so really the important thing is for us to be constantly wary of this technology and how we embed ourselves more and more into the technology. There are definitely some harms there, some spiritual harms, some harms in our practice, in our full personhood as human beings, how we relate to one another and you know a number of other ways. I'd like to, you know, if you don't mind, pick your brain on this issue and I'd like to understand just in the context of this podcast, specifically around the concept of spirituality, like do you mind explaining how it's harming our spirituality and our life in general? Sure, yeah and also just to clarify, you know, the context is really important. So if I'm a person who already spends three hours or more each day on my phone browsing the internet, accessing various social media outlets, you know, communicating with friends and family, if I'm already spending that much time then to channel my energy and my time spent on my
smartphone into other platforms which can help me in my spirituality, which can help me develop mindfulness and better habits as a human being, then that would be good for me in that specific context. So the critique that I'm offering today is a very general one and each person can kind of try to interpret that within their own context. So by no means am I promoting like a blanket pessimism towards smart technology, but since you did ask specifically about some of the spiritual ramifications, some of the things that I mentioned in the paper are number one, our sight, our vision, our ability to see what is in front of us. We know that Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala has placed signs in the horizons, Allah has placed signs within ourselves, Allah has placed signs in history, in the book of nature, and all of this, you know, presupposes the proper use of our sight. We know that our faculties as human beings are not necessarily neutral. There's a great deal of potential in our hearing and our seeing, but what we do with it can sully that faculty, right, can dull it, can corrupt it. And so one of the things that I find quite harmful with addiction to smartphones or addiction to the internet in general is that it frames the way we see the world, because a screen necessarily will hide something and show something else, right, any kind of cinema screen will do that, any storytelling will do that, but with regards to a smartphone, the fact that we consume our news on Facebook more and more, the fact that we, you know, connect with people quote-unquote while at the same time having a sense of social alienation that comes along with this technology, this changes the way that we see, right, we don't see people that are in front of us, we see the people that are connecting quote-unquote with us over the phone more so. I was going to say like, sorry to be a little bit like technical, but why is that a problem? Like just help me understand the difference between connecting
in real life and seeing in real life and touching in real life and hearing versus the smartphone, like I'm still trying to decipher the harms of the smartphone in that context. Sure, yeah, and that's a great question. So I really, I take my lead from Sherry Turkle on this, from MIT, you know, professor, she's written about how we are more connected, you know, in networks and through technology, but we're more alone. So there is tremendous fear of the internet, but we're more afraid of being alone. So there is tremendous feelings of fear of being alone, which constantly being connected through smartphones is nurturing within all of us. It's making us more afraid to be alone because we don't now have that capacity for solitude, which is very important for a human being who is actually on a spiritual quest to be comfortable being alone, right? Not all the time, we are social animals, we are not like from the Christian faith to the mountains and have a monk life in order to get closer to God. We believe that our deen is within the dunya, but at the same time, we have to have a capacity. There has to be a space in our life, in our heart, in the inner silence within each of us where we can be alone because that is where we can commune with Allah and be honest with ourselves and have a muraqabah and take account of ourself. And so there's something about the phone and always reaching for it. You know, you're waiting at a red light, you reach for your phone. You're waiting online, you reach for your phone. You're waiting for a friend to arrive at the cafe, let's say, you reach for your phone. And one of the things that Dr. Turkle says about this is that this gives us some gratifying myths that number one, we can put our attention wherever we want to. And actually, real life is quite messy. Sometimes you are forced into uncomfortable situations because there's a lesson in that for you, or because you have to be called upon to provide a service for another human being, right? Allah may use you to help another person. And those
situations are messy. The phone makes everything very neat. Like, I don't want to talk to this person right now. I'll talk to her later. I haven't responded to this. You know, we're able to choose where we put our attention. And so there's something a bit unnatural about that type of sovereignty that the human being can decide. Oh, you know, I don't want to look at pictures of hungry children. So I'm going to skip this ad. But today, I'm feeling compassionate. So I'll watch it today. So there's something in the way that we are able to set our preferences, what we pay our attention to and what we avoid, which distorts a little bit about who the human being is within this bigger picture. So why is that a bad thing? Like why, you know, skipping ads and, and being in control of what you focus on? Isn't that typically a good thing? Well, I fail to see why the human being should have so much control over the things that pass, like currents through our lives, because there's a reason that everything touches us or encounters us. And in it, there can be pause for reflection, there can be a lesson to be learned, there can be some self improvement that's done. But if we're able to kind of neatly edit our lives, okay, this person brings too much drama to the table, cut, cancel, block, whereas it may be more important for us to be in those uncomfortable spaces and actually do the work on ourselves and help others do that work. So that you know, that would be one of the myths. Another myth is definitely that we never have to be alone. And I think that's also a very important one when it comes to the spiritual question. Because in order to... That makes a lot of sense to me. Like I, you know, when was the last time I actually just sat and reflected, I really can't think of many times maybe, you know, Amr or Ramadan or whatnot, where you're really trying very, very hard to reconnect. But I see your point, like unless I have zero reception, and even then, you know, I'm reaching out my first instinct is to reach out to my phone.
Just on the idea of seeing, I still want to kind of understand that a little bit more, especially in this new world of the metaverse, like augmented reality, I kind of am relatively okay with generally, you know, just being in this world and having screens or having certain things pop up in wearables and whatnot. But the whole idea of a virtual reality, like if I'm barely able to connect in this life, but then connecting, you know, and having spirituality in a life that is outside of this, you know, realm, that's what scares me. So do you mind just maybe focusing a bit more on that concept of seeing and why it's so important? Yeah. So when we walk around in the world, right, the human being enjoys this very special place, you know, Maulana Rumi said that the angels are free because of what they know, and the beasts are free because of what they don't know, and in between is the son of man to struggle. And so we have this very special place where we have a stewardship over the earth, we are the Khalifa of Allah upon the earth, and we are tasked to take care of the earth and all of her creatures. And we are also in this cosmic connection on this hierarchy beneath the angels, beneath the garden tablet, you know, al-Lawh al-Mahfuz, and you know, beneath the decree of Allah. And the human being is interconnected with all these different levels of reality, and within us is actually the microcosm, right, because we have the vegetative aspect, the animal aspect, the angelic aspect, but we are human. And so something about being able to control what we consume. Now, we all have perhaps heard about the studies that show, you know, how people get trapped in echo chambers, that it's very seldom that people on social media consuming news or commentary or trying to gain perspectives, that it's very seldom to be able to
consume the news or to gain perspectives. And it's very seldom that we venture outside of what we already tend to believe. This is one aspect of sight. If we think of sight beyond just eyes, but also in terms of vision and understanding, the way that Allah uses sight in the Quran, right, sight and understanding can be quite analogous. So if we become trapped in our echo chambers, and we have this confirmation bias, and we're, we have a distorted picture of the world, which is what we actually do, or the opposite might be the case. I know many people, unfortunately, who are, who really have an addiction to contention on social media. And there's something that, you know, there's some part of them that wants to seek out the problems and the beef and kind of the arguments and the bad blood that occurs on social media from people who have different perspectives on any given issue. And so that can also distort our understanding, right, like, everyone's against me, right? So either everyone believes what I believe, or everyone's against me, it's hard to have that balanced view, right, to be actually in society, actually be aware of how our neighbors feel about different things. If we're just relying on these communities that we basically control the entry and the exit, who is in our community, right? You could pop in and out of any virtual community, nobody's really going to notice. Whereas in a traditional community, there's actual ties that bind us together. And we are one another's concern. So there's this level of anonymity, you know, there's a level of narcissism, I would add, where if you spend a great deal of time in a metaverse, right, or just on regular social media before the metaverse, and you are existing in a space that is filled with images of the human being, right, we live in a world of our own images. And this really started back in the 40s and 50s in the United States anyway, in my context, where advertising blows up, right, and the consumer economy blows
up. And people just walk around surrounded by advertisements showing the human form, you know, airbrushed and perfected and unnecessarily, you know, idealistic. But nonetheless, it's just all humans and what humans create. That's a distortion. When you actually walk around in the world, you actually get to see, you know, the wind blowing through the trees, you have a different sense of who you are as a creature upon this earth. Whereas if you spend your time looking at other human beings, and they're not even human beings, it's profiles of human beings, right. So more people catering and editing and deleting and creating these personas. So there's quite a number of distortions. I'm sorry for being long winded, but there's quite a number of distortions. It's important that you spell it out. I think you mentioned in your paper as well that people's rights over us are no longer fulfilled, because we're in those eco chambers, because we're able to block a phone number or reply to a WhatsApp message in a few days time. And also you mentioned about the natural environment and its rights over us and our interaction with that. So clearly there are several issues with having smartphones now that you've spelled them out. And I appreciate you going to the effort of being very, very explicit in explaining the harms of smartphones. And I want to go back to your first point of the smartphones having a negative impact on our lives, that generally speaking, they pull us away from spirituality and they pull us away from the important relationships that we need to have in this life. What would it look like then? Because we could speak all day about I think the negatives. What would it look like for us to reclaim our spirituality in this world where we're very, very dependent on smartphones?
Well, you know, may Allah give us all Tawfiq. I definitely don't have the answer, the definitive answer, but definitely we have to try. This is a technology which was made by human beings. And so if we can perceive it for what it is, then we can move towards responsible use. So definitely don't want to advocate for a great big bonfire of the vanities and we all chuck our smartphones into it. That would not be beneficial to us because now we've become accustomed to using these technologies to the extent where if we pull away from them too sharply, we will actually suffer in the way that we do things. And this is a lot of people have talked about how these technologies become ubiquitous and now it becomes almost impossible to avoid them completely. For example, the payphone, right? Payphones used to be everywhere, but because of the ubiquity of cell phones, communicating without a cell phone is now kind of an impediment, right? So definitely we can try our best to use it responsibly and that can mean a number of things. So you can have blackout times in the day where you reclaim your family time, let's say, and you stow all the devices away in a black box in your house, right? And no one's going to use them. Definitely there should be perhaps certain times of the day, which automatically we should have a privacy filter in our life where we keep the cell phones away from us. I mean, cell phones are always transmitting information. So it's a good idea that you don't bring them into your bedroom. It's a good idea that, you know, for all of my sisters who observe recovering, you know, that we don't kind of take off our hijab in front of a cell phone. I know it seems kind of strange to say that, but it's worth mentioning. You know, a lot of our young sisters I teach high school right now don't make that connection. They think of the phone as a neutral mirror and, you know, they'll kind of do that. So that's something to keep in
mind. At our dinner tables, perhaps there shouldn't be any phones allowed at the dinner table because it's more important. And, you know, not everybody is dining with their family, but for those of us who are, it's important that we, instead of being someplace else, you know, while sitting physically at the table, being mentally and emotionally someplace else, it's very important to be present where we are because to be able to be present where you are, you know, neither in the future nor in the past is, I think, one of the preconditions of trying to develop. develop khushu' within our prayer, for example, and to have that close communion with Allah in solitude. So it's not a bad idea. Now, of course, cell phones are very useful in that spiritual quest too, right? People have the call to prayer on their phone and that helps them wake up for fajr prayer. They call one another, they have trains for waking one another up, and there's apps that can help you learn the Qur'an and recite properly. So if we can use responsibly and also just cut down the total amount of time, because we shouldn't be spending that much time on something that flickers and beeps and sits within the palm of our hand, and is actually, you know, made by firms who use our data in ways that we don't even know, lest alone are able to control. So all of these things, we have to keep them in mind. And then inshallah, we can move towards responsible use, you know, a limited use of these devices would allow us to perhaps focus on the more tangible aspects of our spiritual quest. JazakAllah khair. So the main message is really just the reduction of its use, like so reducing the hours that we spend on the smartphone. That's kind of the main theme in order to combat our over-reliance, if I've understood correctly. Yes, I would say that that's correct. And then we can perhaps take more steps and really interrogate, you know, what are the apps that we use on our phones?
So one thing that, you know, in my family, my poor kids and my poor husband, alhamdulillah, you know, I don't really want people to use the GPS to get places. I really, you know, as needed, let's say you're going to the airport to pick someone up, you don't know how to get to that airport. But number one, we need to be fluent and competent in the physical space and the landscapes where we actually live and where we actually work and where we actually go to school. Not everything has to be done in a car. You know, things can be done by bike and by walking and by public transport, and none of those require a GPS. It's possible to actually go back to physical maps, right, to have an atlas of your locale and to be able to find your way around. Those spatial skills are extremely important. We don't want to trade them in for a rather passive consumption of information, which is bleeded out to us piece by piece without even having a bigger picture. So that's just one example. And it may not be relevant for everyone, but I'm just giving you an example from my own personal experience that that can be another form of... I'm just curious, like, is there another common app that everyone uses that you have kind of boycotted in your household? Well, one thing that I try to enjoin on, you know, my children, my husband, whoever else is willing to listen when I get up on my soapbox is really just to avoid apps altogether unless it's absolutely necessary. Because what happens is the app becomes like your friend and your assistant. But what you end up doing, you end up trading in very actual knowledge that you yourself will possess. It's like the difference, if you'll allow me to give an analogy. Yeah, go for it. Because my background is in political economy. So this is how I understand the situation of the explosion of technological firms, the explosion of the data economy. It's really what stage of capitalism are we at right now, right? So I'm able to kind of look back and make some analogy.
If you think about the way that the automobile, right, when the automobile was invented and automation started to come about. Before that, let's say you look at the guild economy. Previously, you know, before industrial modernity, people used to learn a craft. So you used to go, used to have a teacher, you would join a community of students who learn from a teacher. So it's kind of like the Ijazah system. But when it comes to practical arts and sciences like blacksmith, right, or glassblowing, for example. And so you learn a particular craft and it's very hands on. It's embodied knowledge, right? You learn by doing, you learn by repetition, like you when you can start fishing in your sleep, you know, you fished enough times. And so there is a transformation of the person, of the psyche, of your knowledge base that occurs when you engage in a knowledge quest like that. What happens a lot of times in the modern factory is that each person now is rather useless as a, as a, what's the word, as an artisan, right? They're not part of a guild, they're part of a factory. It's a completely different logic. So I just push this button. The woman next to me just pushes the other button. Each of us is just a button pusher at the end of the day. And so when we think, when we try to now make the analogy to apps on our smartphone, it may be that we are losing like segments of our knowledge base because we're just outsourcing these tasks to these algorithms and these, you know, interesting applications that can, in the name of convenience, that can do all of this for us. But what are we losing in exchange for that convenience? That would be the question. So what, I mean, you've spoken about that loss of solitude, the time that we have dedicated to really ponder and reflect and connect with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.
I think that fully makes sense. You spoke about the rights of others on us. You spoke about being aware of our surroundings in terms of nature and navigation and whatnot. All that is relatively compelling, but what you're asking me to do, I probably won't go as far as what you do in your household and kind of, you know, kill smartphones for many hours of the day. That would be a big ask, but what are we losing? Like, I want you to maybe push a little bit further in terms of the need to really shake things up with regards to our use of smartphones. Sure. Yeah, no, that's a fair question because this has been very, I think it's a general critique, but if we get a little bit more specific, you know, internet addiction or smartphone addiction is like any other form of addiction. So it's not particularly heinous, right? Any form of addiction is a spiritual harm on the person who is kind of lost in that addiction. And internet addiction is being recognized by clinicians and by educators and social workers, people who work with youth, marriage counselors. Internet addiction is being recognized as a new form of widespread addiction, and it's characterized by all of the other markers of other forms of addiction, whether it's substance abuse or, you know, we don't even have to take it to such an extreme level. Like, let's say I'm addicted to, you know, too much speaking or too much sleeping or too much eating or eating too much sugar or too much soda. Like each of us in our own personal life can take account of ourselves and figure out, OK, we have this over dependence on some aspect of the dunya which only feeds our nafs.
So whatever that may be, whether it's a phone or it's a bottle of soda, for example, it's our job to be mindful about it and work as best as we can to minimize that addiction. And internet addiction, definitely, I mean, in small children, this is coming out of the Pediatric Association of the United States. While there are benefits to putting younger and younger children in front of more and more digital, you know, access, digital access to screen time and educational forms. You know, while there are benefits that you can expose children to new ideas sooner in their life that can benefit them educationally. We're seeing that, you know, in their sleep, in their ability to pay attention, obesity numbers, depression, anxiety, that in the youngest members of our society from three years through the adolescent period, through the teenage period into young adults. The data is showing that this over reliance and this addiction to devices and to the Internet in general is really quite harmful. It also opens up young people to a world of risk and harm, and I won't get into that, but we all know that the Internet can be a harmful place for a young person who's not aware how they should navigate and how they should stay safe on it. Right. But, you know, in adults, we see that there's some physical signs of Internet addiction, again, with our sleep, in our joints, poor circulation. You know, people go through withdrawal when they when they don't have access to their devices for a period of time for whatever reason. There's a compulsion in it, an obsessive nature to it. And so that's definitely on the side of the addiction, right on the side of the earth and our stewardship of the earth and trying to maintain ourselves in caring for the earth, even though climate change is presenting with a number of extreme limits that we are coming up against as a species now where people maybe lose hope and they say, well, what can I do?
But nonetheless, each of us is a steward. And we know that even if the day of judgment is upon us, we plant a tree, we still get the reward for that. Right. What does that mean? It means don't lose hope. It means even until the last moment, like do whatever it is you can, little or big. And so all of these devices and these gadgets, which are built to break, they're built to be obsolete in a couple of years so that you can run out and buy the next one. They're not coming out of a void and they don't go into a void when we throw them away. The way that these minerals are mined, the factories where these things are produced, you know, this is the global supply chain is a is really a damning indicator of where we are as a species with regards to our addiction. For more and more products and and what it's doing to the earth, like we're mining too much. We're we're we're trashing the resources too quickly. And then we just throw these things away. And even in disposing of them, there's also more toxic processes that come out of that. So that's another way that we should try to think about what they call voting with your dollars. We can try to to think of our political power in this world coming out of our spiritual imperative as a Muslim. And we can think of what we don't want to spend our money. We don't want to be trapped in the cycle. We don't want to have been ensnared by this plot that says, well, you know, your value will partially be determined by the sophistication of your technological gadget, how much you are able to keep pace with this river, which has no intention of stopping, but only gets faster and faster every day. And in order to demonstrate that value, you will have to participate in exploiting the earth of her resources in a number of ways. And I go into more detail in the paper as to what those resources are, how they harm communities and societies, and as well as in the disposal process, as is the case with China.
If we go down the route of like talking supply chain, clearly we can. You have a passion for it. So I'm not going to open that can of worms. I wanted to ask you about what tools we have in our religion in order to counter this wave. You know, I was once in a crisis committee and the PR company that we hired, a multi-million dollar contract, their main message to us was if you want to counter a negative narrative, build a stronger, positive narrative. And so if this wave of smartphones and addiction to the internet and smartphones is a net negative on my life, what can I use from Islam in order to counter that and create a more positive addiction, so to speak, and a wave of positivity? So one thing I wanted to bring up was the Quran and its role in countering my addiction and my over-reliance on smartphones. You know, that's great advice is to create a more powerful rival narrative, mashallah. I mean, our religion is our source of all meaning for us in our life, right? We are not purposeless, subhanAllah. We know exactly what is the purpose of us being here on this earth. That's a lot more than many communities are able to answer, which really explains some of the existential crises that a lot of communities are going through all around us. And, you know, if we understand our purpose, why we were created by Allah, what is the nature of the dunya, what is the nature of the human being, all of these come together and form a very complete picture. So it really does help to paint a middle path approach where we are not, you know, accepting hook, line, and sinker,
every advertisement and everything we have to do and purchase and use it more and more and enter the metaverse. And, you know, the virtual world is a lot more pleasant a lot of times than the actual one. So we don't we won't fall into such escapism, inshallah, because we know that we have an ultimate purpose. Right. And it's important for us to be seeing and hearing clearly and understanding our situation. At the same time, we're not going to wholesale cancel or or or, you know, block or just completely dispose of this technology, because we know that there can be good in it. We know that even in a calamity, Allah can bring some good out of that. And so we know that even if something can be harmful, that we can appropriate it, inshallah, because Allah made us intelligent. We don't run away from the world. Right. We are in the world and that is where we move in order to gain closer to Allah's pleasure. So we would use those devices and, you know, the resources available through the Internet in a responsible way. And you were asking specifically about the Quran and what role that would play in it. I mean. Allah gives answers to questions that we didn't even know we were asking, all we do is approach, you know, if all we do is approach Allah, approach his book, approach the approach, Ibadah and inshallah, may Allah give us all Tawfiq in order to be able to do that. I really do wish I had more of a substantive answer to share on that, but I will definitely say that, you know, the Quran is Allah's eternal word and it's amazing that it takes a physical form and is able to be with us in this life in a physical way and we can have its recitation and we can see its words transcribed and then inshallah we can commit it to memory and recite and reflect upon it.
And there's something so diametrically opposed because Allah's word is eternal and we live in this fleeting world and more and more the world is more and more fleeting, right? There is less and less fixity in the world. Things are turning over at an ever increasing rate. This is what we call liquid modernity. And so it seems like we're living in quicksand or in a typhoon where things just wash away so quickly and our use of the cell phone and our use of kind of the currents, the endless scroll and the flux, right? The nature of this dunya is flux and fleeting, but Allah's face is eternal and it will never, you know, it will never perish as Allah says in Surah Ar-Rahman. And so there's a comfort I think because it's very easy when you start to uncover like a specific social problem, right? It's very easy to lose hope and a lot of activists, you know, whether you're talking about activists in the dawah or you're talking about political activists, a lot of people who are active out there and they want to understand social problems and they want to help people to understand social problems so we could live better lives often experience like hopelessness and burnout, right? But the Quran helps to center us back because the message of the Quran is always one at the end of the day of hope, no matter what, even though Allah gives us all of these examples of people who came before us and who perished, you know, and tells us kind of what were their spiritual mistakes and make sure we don't make the same, you know, to not be arrogant and to not be think ourselves self-sufficient. And there's so many examples throughout the Quran for lessons for us to kind of have a moral posture as we move through this world and try to understand these social problems. But there is a great comfort in knowing that this dunya is like always changing. Everything that is born into it dies. It's constantly perishing. And then Allah's face is eternal, right? And we will meet him on the Day of Judgment.
And so there's a tremendous comfort and it prevents one from losing hope. So if you're, you know, your over-reliance on a phone is bringing you anxiety, maybe you're not at the point of even accepting that that is what is actually going on. But for a lot of people, they experience depression or anxiety as a result of too much time. And just to unplug a little bit at a time will show a person what were the effects, right? A lot of times you have to take a step back in order to be able to even understand what you were inside of, right? You can't see from inside of the eye of the storm. You have to be outside of it to understand kind of what is the context there. And so that to me, I think, is the greatest benefit with regard to our, you know, understanding our over-reliance on cell phones is knowing that Allah's eternal, you know, his face is eternal, his word is eternal, and everything here which is constantly changing, which we oftentimes can't do anything to, you know, to stop or to slow down or even to really change. We're not history makers. We can try, but at the end of the day, it's, you know, whatever Allah wants is what's going to happen. And so that is a great comfort, a great source of comfort is knowing that. Jazakallah khair. One final question, Dr. Zahra, before we move on to a bunch of rapid fire questions that I'm hoping to surprise you with. My nine-year-old niece who features in every episode of Double Take, she comes to you and asks, what am I losing by being over-reliant on smartphones? What would be your answer to her? Yeah, well, I would say that, you know, that's an excellent question, little sister. And, you know, this is just a piece of machinery in your hands. It's bright lights and flashing lights and sweet sounds.
And it'll make you feel like people like what you put out there in the world. But if you put it away and you actually go and you be with the people in your life and you go outside to play and you kind of learn from the signs all around us, that that is a much better way of experiencing life. It's okay to look into the small screen for a few minutes, for a little bit of time, maybe to watch a movie with your mom or your dad, and then put it away. Because there's something about it that it's just made in a way that it slowly, slowly sucks you into the point where you can't see what's around you anymore. So we have to be very careful. We have to use it very responsibly. Inshallah. Jazakallah khair. Dr. Zahra, we're going to ask you a series of quick questions. You're going to have a few seconds to answer each one. Are you ready, Inshallah? Bismillah. Okay, we'll do a couple of easy ones and then we'll get into kind of the heavy ones. Who is your favorite qarah, reciter of the Quran? This is Sheikh Mishri Al-Afasi. Al-Afasi. You know, without all these apps, you wouldn't be able to listen to him regularly. I'm just pulling your leg. What's the last book that you were reading? I'm still reading it. It's Birds and a Snake by Alan Bell. What's the crux of it? So it's a fable. It's written like a fable, like an animal story in the traditional sense, but it's actually the culmination of this man's 20-year spiritual quest. It's written from the perspective of the serpent who goes into the kingdom of birds and then experiences an enlightenment. So something like Conference of the Birds by Al-Farabi, but a new age version of it, you can say. I hope you don't mind me asking this question.
You can just say pass if you don't like it, but let's just say you have the opportunity to get into the metaverse and meet someone from history and have dinner with them. It can't be the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. Who would you choose to have dinner with in the metaverse? With Omar Mukhtar, may Allah sanctify his heart. Why him out of everyone? Because he was a lion-hearted, great Muslim spiritual leader, and not just spiritual in the sense of an abstract spirituality, but spirituality walking upon the earth and wielding a sword, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for that. Dr. Zahra, you're fluent in English, Urdu, and Spanish. MashaAllah. How did you learn Spanish and how often do you speak it? I actually went to school in New York City. I came up in the New York City public education system, so from sixth grade I had to take another language, and my mother who worked in the school system advised us to take Spanish because of how important it was in New York City. I took it all the way through university, and I didn't know I was going to marry a Colombian brother, but Alhamdulillah, now I just use it with my in-laws. Awesome. You've talked a lot about how pop culture can actually teach us about what people believe. Do you mind just very quickly telling us more about that connection? Yeah, absolutely. Popular culture is the outermost form that we see and we consume, and it is rooted in the values of a society, and those, like the roots of a tree, are further rooted in the philosophy of life, right? In the big questions that human beings grapple with, you know, what is the meaning of life, what is the human being, who is God? So when you see pop culture, the outermost branch, you know, the fruit hanging from the tree,
it indicates something about what is the deeper understanding of that civilization or that society. And you've said that your goal is to contribute to the Islamicization of profane knowledge. Now, there are two terms there that I have no idea what I'm saying, asking that question. What is Islamization, Islamicization, and what is profane knowledge? Yeah, mashallah. No, I have to thank Brother Asadullah Ali, a fellow, a research fellow at Yaqeen, who really took some time to converse with me about this, and the Islamicization of knowledge is a movement that came up in the Muslim world. Sayyid Muhammad Naqib al-Aqas, may Allah bless him, he is one of the big proponents, and he's where I kind of get my understanding of what should be my work as a social scientist and as a Muslim. And it means that, you know, in our situation in modernity, the Muslim world was disrupted, right? There was colonialism, there was the breaking of our traditional structures of passing on knowledge from one generation to the next, loss of political power, and then terrible economic conditions as well. And so, Islamicization of knowledge says that what we need to do is not just appropriate Western scientific knowledge and political rationality and just kind of catch up with the rest of the world that way, but we need to take our own sources of knowledge, right, the revelation and the true report of the Prophet ﷺ, and interpret freshly these novel conditions that we find ourselves in, and profane knowledge because you cannot Islamicize tafsir study, you cannot Islamicize hadith studies or kalam or tasawwuf, right? Those are already Islamic sciences, those are our uloom al-din. But you can, like social scientists, Muslim social scientists in the past have done, you can take phenomenal knowledge, profane being the opposite of sacred, right?
So everyday dunya knowledge, practical knowledge, and you can Islamicize it by interpreting it through our ethical principles as Muslims. JazakAllah khair. And one final question, if you had all the resources in the world to focus on one project of benefit to Muslim societies, what would be that body of work that you would focus on? MashaAllah, I tend to think that all projects should be as local as possible, so, and this is just something new that I'm kind of grappling with and working with these past two years, so I would think that I would want to, the strength of it, the resourcefulness of it would be how close are the bonds of the brothers and sisters and non-Muslim neighbors within a very small community, a locale, who can then identify what is the project needed for this group of people and what can we do to bring that about. So I would be the wrong person to ask in terms of a big picture project. No, that's awesome. I mean, you're the second person this season who said the same thing, that you would focus on the local versus anything really grand and global. And that says something. So JazakAllah khair. Dr. Zahra, thank you so much for your time. InshAllah, we'll have you again on Double Take for another topic. BarakAllah Fiki. JazakAllah khair, Brad. Thanks so much for having me on.
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