Tech

abstract away worship at your own peril

abstraction in innovation, technology, and worship - where does it make sense?

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Mohamed Hassan
abstract away worship at your own peril

Abstraction is the process of removing characteristics from a thing or a process, to reduce it to a set of essential characteristics - usually to reduce complexity and/or increase efficiency. To abstract is to chisel away everything that is unessential.

From the butchers who present us with neatly diced meat for our kitchens, to the phones that have created a world where communicating across continents is instantaneous, abstraction goes hand-in-hand with innovation and has made our lives significantly easier.

Yet, lurking in the shadows of this transformative force lies a great risk - the risk of abstracting too zealously, threatening to strip away the intrinsic essence of things and their function, leaving us with a distorted product that is no longer recognisable.

Throughout time, we’ve spent a lot of time abstracting away, altering how we interact with the world - ask yourself, when was the last time you went hunting for food, or picked fruits and vegetables - probably never. Even as an Engineer, it’s a key tenet of the languages I work with everyday, from the methods I choose to expose in classes to the languages I choose to programme in - i.e, tasks like memory allocation or garbage collection are hidden under the hood in JavaScript, allowing you to focus on mission critical work, unlike lower level languages like C. All of this is to say that we have made significant progress because of our ability to rid a system of what doesn’t matter or what we don't need to think about in order to simplify it or make it more efficient.

Here's the kicker. There is an upper limit to abstraction, something that the tech-solutionists tend to overlook - the whole aim of abstraction is to reduce ~something~ to a set of essential characteristics and to over-abstract is not only to miss the mark, but it is to mutate the very essence of what you’re trying to simplify or enhance - it’s to throw the baby, the bathtub, and the sink out with the bathwater.

With Ramadan around the corner, charity is a great example of where we get this wrong. There are many platforms and apps that are innovating to make giving charity easier and more convenient - an infamous one that creates a buzz every Ramadan is My Ten Nights. My Ten Nights is a platform which has facilitated the donation of $100 million, promising users to “automate your donations over the last 10 nights of Ramadan, so you never miss Laylatul Qadr again”.

This is an incredible proposition, a promise of convenience, a promise to delegate your worship to a digital slave as you mindlessly go about your day without a care in the world - a cheat-code not too dissimilar to spawning a jetpack in GTA at the stroke of a few buttons.

This is antithetical to worship, worship is an active effort, without shortcuts, it’s an ardent, active pursuit that by it’s very nature transcends convenience and to rip away effort and striving out of worship is to neglect the sanctity of devotion.

In this spirit, it’s not too difficult to imagine a not too distant future where we are planting our feet on conveyer-belts that move us at 50mph to circumambulate the Kabaa, before we hop on our electric scooters to dart back and forth between Safa and Marwa, all in the name of convenience, tech-innovation, and a ‘founded-by-Muslims-for-Muslims’ tagline.

I understand the utility of a platform like My Ten Nights and how it can be a lifeline for those who are in the masjid during the last 10 nights of Ramadan and are unable to give charity or mothers who have their hands full with caring for their children. But it’s the “so you never miss Laylatul Qadr again” in the tagline that I find very sinister as it gives Muslims the license to abstract worship in the name of convenience.

In a world filled with shortcuts and quick fixes, let us preserve the sanctity of devotion & worship and continue to struggle in the blessing that is worship.