https://rusafatoramla.substack.com/p/the-sufi-case-for-environmentalism
If the critique of modernity boils down to plastics being too far removed from the natural world, then it stands to reason that the critique itself collapses the moment it touches the modern conditions (computer, phones, laptops, servers, petrochemical infrastructure, etc) under which it is being made.
I invite the author and other Muslims of Sufi orientation to read our essay about Digital Hijra:
The Modern Trap
Digital Hijra has to begin with a more serious diagnosis of the world we are living in. The problem is not simply that Muslims use the wrong apps, or spend too much time online, or have become overly dependent on convenient technology. The deeper problem is that the modern digital environment is one expression of a much larger civilizational process that uproots people from inherited forms of life and then traps them in systems that cannot restore what they have destroyed. In the language of deterritorialization, this is the process by which stable moral worlds, communal bonds, inherited disciplines, and rooted ways of living are broken apart and replaced by abstraction, speed, exposure, and endless circulation.
But hypermodernity does not stop at destruction. Deterritorialization is almost always simultaneously followed and accompanied by reterritorialization, or the attempt to rebuild order after tradition has already been dismantled. The problem is that these new structures inevitably arise within the same framework that produced the destruction in the first place. In the first part of his trio of essays on "Islam Between East and West", Eco insightfully writes:
“...deterritorialization that is not yet absolute is accompanied by a “reterritorialization”, where new structures, ideas, movements and norms arise to re-implement order. The problem here is that this reterritorialization will occur after tradition has been decimated and as such always must adhere to some form of modernity as it has nothing to build upon. In this sense, reterritorialization mainly becomes the political order’s attempt to control the process. Through this attempt however, it automatically aligns itself with modernity and often becomes the entrenchment of these values in society, simply being the other side of the coin to deterritorialization. As such, similar panic reactions can never be a solution to modernity’s problems and in fact will often serve as the enforcement and normalization of destruction."[1]
So that is the trap. Hypermodernity does not simply dissolve older forms of life. It also generates reactive attempts to restore order that end up reproducing its logic in a new form. We have good reason to believe that the digital world intensifies this whole condition. It is not merely a neutral collection of tools, but a terrain where fragmentation is accelerated, attention is captured, and life is reorganized around visibility, dependency, consumption, and control.
This is why Digital Hijra cannot be reduced to critique, but it also cannot be understood as just another attempt to rebuild inside the terms set by the modern world.
Many forms of resistance fail precisely because they remain trapped within the cycle, reacting to hypermodernity while still borrowing its assumptions, its methods, and even its understanding of what order is supposed to look like. They oppose the dominant system only to recreate it in a more aesthetic or panicked form.
Digital Hijra, if it is to mean anything at all, has to break with that pattern. It is not mere withdrawal or minimalist posturing, and it is certainly not a Muslim version of a slight technophobia. Nor is it simply an attempt to patch over digital fragmentation with new structures that still rest on the same dependency-producing foundations. Rather, it is an effort to step outside that cycle by re-rooting digital life within an Islamic moral center. It is a movement away from forms of life that dissolve memory, discipline, privacy, authority, and responsibility, and toward forms of life that restore them under the sovereignty of Allah (swt). In that sense, we must go beyond what we are leaving behind by refusing to be endlessly remade by the same civilizational process, and instead we must become the kind of people who can live differently after the break.
By Digital Hijra, we mean the purposeful migration and reorientation of a Muslim away from extractive, corporate panopticon platforms and riba-fueled systems designed to capture attention and shape behavior, into self-hosted, user-owned infrastructure and habits that restore privacy and vicegerency, not as mere zuhd but as engaged praxis, tribe-making, and pattern-aware navigation in service of Allah (swt).
It is not just a matter of avoiding a few bad apps (though that is a part of it!), and it is not reducible to a vague preference for anti-zionist “ethical tech.”[2] It enables a broader reorientation in how one inhabits digital life altogether. The point is to go beyond consuming different products. It is to begin thinking seriously about what kinds of systems we rely on, what kinds of people those systems shape us into, and whether our digital environment helps preserve our dignity. Digital Hijra is therefore not a retreat from technology as such. It is a refusal to remain passively formed by technologies built on extraction, manipulation, and enclosure.
It should be obvious that this also means that Digital Hijra should not be confused with the growing habit of slapping Islamic branding onto the same extractive and closed digital forms. A Muslim-themed app is not necessarily a meaningful alternative. A platform aimed at Muslims can still train the same appetites and the same dependencies, and even entrench the same passivity as the wider ecosystem it claims to improve on. This is why Digital Hijra has to be understood as something deeper than representation or some aesthetic orientation. It cannot be about making the current digital order feel more familiar or more comfortable for Muslims. Instead, we should be asking whether the underlying structure itself is worth inhabiting, and if it is not, what it would mean to begin building and living otherwise.
Once we can take the question seriously, the issue of technology can no longer be treated as neutral. Tools are never just tools in the shallow sense people often mean. They carry assumptions, they distribute power in particular ways, they come with a design space, and they encourage and cement certain habits and discourage others. Some tools extend human agency and make a person more capable, more responsible, and more aware of what he is doing. Other tools reduce him to a user in the narrowest sense of the word, that is to say, someone who mindlessly consumes an interface, depends on hidden systems he does not understand, and quietly and consistently surrenders control in exchange for convenience.
The question is never only whether the tech just works. The more important question is what kind of human being the tech expects, and what kind of human being the tech produces.
For Muslims living under hypermodern conditions, that question becomes unavoidable. We need technologies that preserve a meaningful degree of agency and ownership rather than dissolving them. We need tools that can be governed, inspected, modified, and understood at least to some reasonable extent by those who use them and the communities built around them. We should be deeply suspicious of systems that demand blind trust, or hide their operations, or harvest data by default, or make independent use impossible without the approval of some distant corporate authority. This is not to say that complexity itself is evil, nor to say that every Muslim must become a competent programmer. It is to stress that a life of total technological dependence inevitably weakens responsibility. If a person has no meaningful say over the systems that mediate his communication, memory, wealth, and daily habits, then his freedom within those systems is already narrower than he imagines, or perhaps it is even non-existent altogether.
So this is why Digital Hijra has to begin at the base layer. If the foundations of one’s digital life are captured, then whatever is built on top of them will remain conditional. Hardware matters. Operating systems matter. The way software is distributed matters. The rails through which one communicates, transacts, stores, and coordinates all matter. If these layers are closed, surveilled, permissioned, or dependent on Jewish owned institutions fundamentally hostile to privacy and autonomy, then no amount of better posting or cleaner branding will fix the problem. The corruption is deeper than the content. It is infrastructural. And once that is understood, Digital Hijra starts to appear as the attempt to reestablish Muslim life on more sovereign digital foundations before everything above those foundations is further hollowed out.
##False Alternatives
The failure of many so-called Muslim alternatives is that they do not actually depart from the structure of the systems they claim to oppose. They simply reproduce the same architecture with a more sympathetic aesthetic. What results is not the Digital Hijra we are talking about here but a softer version of the same captivity. We end up with Muslim demoralizing marriage apps that still reduce human relations to platform logic, Muslim content ecosystems that still revolve around audience capture and stupid vanity metrics, and Muslim social platforms that still depend on the same centralized app stores, and often the same habits of passive consumption that have already done so much damage. None of this gets to the root of the problem. If the basic structure remains one of dependency and capture, then changing the branding changes very little. It just gives the user a more culturally familiar way to remain downstream of the same machinery.
This is why Digital Hijra cannot be reduced to building “Muslim versions” of legacy systems. A platform does not become meaningful simply because it is aimed at Muslims, nor does a project become a tool for liberation just because it speaks the post-colonial language of censorship resistance or community empowerment. What matters is whether it actually changes the terms on which people participate. Does it reduce dependence on gatekeepers, or does it merely ask for a more polite gatekeeper? Does it increase ownership and user sovereignty, or does it keep the user in the same passive role? These are the uncomfortable questions that we should be asking. The point is not to carve out a niche inside the existing digital order and assume that will bring us victory. The point is to build in such a way that the old order becomes less necessary, less central, and eventually less relevant to Muslim life altogether.
We can already see the limits of the wrong approach in two recent examples that we'll mention briefly.
Upscrolled was presented as a pro-Palestine and Muslim-friendly alternative to legacy social media, especially for people tired of censorship around Palestine and other issues that the mainstream platforms aggressively police. But even here the contradiction quickly became obvious. Not only did censorship still become an issue, but the app itself remained dependent on the approval of Apple and Google for distribution. So when it was pulled out of the app store [3], the community was pushed right back into the humiliating position of making noise on the very legacy platforms they claimed to be escaping, essentially begging the app stores to restore access! That should tell us that something is seriously wrong here. If the success of your alternative still depends on permission from the owners of the dominant system, then your alternative is not sovereign in any serious sense. It is rented space. It is tolerated until it is not.
LaunchGood reveals the same problem on the financial side. It has played an important role in helping Muslims and Muslim causes raise money, and that should be acknowledged, but it has also repeatedly run into the hard wall of debanking and payment suppression (so much so that its regular occurrence has become a meme in Muslim bitcoiner spaces).[4] And when that happens, the platform and its users are again forced into a degrading position, appealing to fiat banks and payment processors to restore their right to transact, as though the basic ability of Muslims to move money for lawful causes were a favor to be granted by hostile institutions!
This is precisely the kind of dependency Digital Hijra has to take seriously. A community that cannot communicate without app store permission and cannot transact without banking permission is not meaningfully free, no matter how polished its platforms look on the surface, as it is still living inside an architecture where we do not control the switch.
The instinctive response to these failures is often to say that what we need, then, is a Muslim app store, a Muslim bank, a Muslim payment processor, a Muslim streaming platform, a Muslim version of whatever just failed us. But that response is often just another way of thinking from inside the same paradigm. It accepts the inherited model and merely tries to place Muslims in charge of one piece of it. Sometimes that may offer short-term utility, and there is nothing wrong with recognizing temporary advantages where they exist, but it still falls short of the deeper task. So instead of aspiring to be the new managers of the same dependency-producing structure, we should be actively reducing dependency as such. So the more meaningful path is not to build one centralized replacement for each centralized failure, but to move toward systems that can be copied, revised, distributed, verified, and sustained across many different points rather than one chokepoint that can be shut down.
The Digital Muhajir
That shift in mindset changes the kind of Muslim that we need to be calling for. The enshittified subscription economy has trained people to live as tenants in every part of life. They rent access instead of actually owning, and they install (if they are allowed to), mindlessly scroll, pay with Riba based credit, and consume without ever asking what the system is doing in the background, who controls it, what is being extracted from them, or how quickly their access can be revoked. That is the current predicament we find ourselves in.
Digital Hijra requires a break from that passivity. It asks the Muslim to stop thinking like a consumer of permissioned platforms and start thinking like a custodian of the tools he relies on. Again, that does not mean everyone must become a super developer or github power user. It means that one should want, at a minimum, a greater degree of responsibility, intelligibility, and control over the systems that mediate one’s life. A Muslim should want digital property to be more like property in the physical world, where it is something he can actually possess and take responsibility for, not something he merely accesses on borrowed terms.
This is where we think a cypherpunk disposition becomes necessary [5], though it must be disciplined by Islamic ethics and not confused with rebellion for its own sake. In simple terms, the cypherpunk instinct is the view that privacy, encryption, decentralization, and user sovereignty are not luxuries but necessary conditions for living with dignity in digital space. It does not assume that institutions will behave morally if asked nicely enough, and it does not wait for permission to preserve a sphere of independence. For Muslims, this posture matters not because resistance itself is sacred, but because the protection of trust, privacy, property, and moral agency matters. Under present conditions, those things increasingly require technical means to defend them. In that sense, Digital Hijra requires the cultivation of a different temperament entirely, one that is less enchanted by convenience and less willing to outsource responsibility, and more prepared to build and inhabit digital life on terms that do not begin with surrender.
If Digital Hijra has to begin at the base layer, then one of the clearest first steps that makes sense is Linux. Now this is not because Linux is some magical operating system that instantly makes its users virtuous, nor because merely installing it automatically turns a person into a serious and sovereign actor. The point is actually simpler than that. Linux changes your relationship to the machine. It gives you a great degree of control and freedom (sudo) that the dominant operating systems (Microslop and Gaypple) are increasingly unwilling to tolerate. It invites the user to actually govern and shape his system rather than merely consume it. You are no longer trapped inside a seemingly polished enclosure that is deliberately constructed to keep you dependent and passively legible. You gain access to the underlying logic of the machine, and with that access comes great power, and "#3) With great power comes great responsibility."[6] Digital Hijra requires at least some movement in this direction, because a Muslim who wants greater sovereignty in the digital cannot remain forever content with systems that automatically prevent meaningful ownership at the operating system level.
The same applies, perhaps even more urgently, to the smartphone. For most people, the phone is now the most intimate surveillance device in their lives. It sits beside them while they sleep, travels with them, listens, tracks, mediates their communications, records their habits, and trains them into compulsive patterns of distraction and dependence. If Digital Hijra never seriously confronts the phone, then it leaves untouched one of the most invasive layers of modern digital control.
This is why GrapheneOS is key.[7] It represents a move away from the default mobile environment of either Apple or Android, which is structured around surveillance and a constant dependence on a permissioned and closed ecosystem. Yes, a hardened, de-Googled phone does not solve everything, but it does begin to restore a healthier relationship between the user and the device. GrapheneOS grants more intentional control over what the phone is doing, and actual ownership over the software.
None of this, however, becomes durable without a neutral monetary foundation. Too many attempts to build alternatives remain trapped because they still depend on fiat financial rails. They can certainly speak the language of independence all they want, but if they still require bank approval and the constant mediation of fiat institutions, then their freedom remains partial and fragile, and perhaps even nonexistent. This is where Bitcoin becomes indispensable to Digital Hijra. Bitcoin is what gives this entire project economic weight, especially in the long term. It is what allows value to be stored, sent, and received without asking permission from a bank, without routing one’s livelihood through usurious financial intermediaries, and without relying on institutions that can freeze, censor, debase, or deplatform at will. But even here the point is not simply to “own Bitcoin” in the shallow sense that people often mean. Bitcoin held on an exchange, treated as a speculative stock to be sold back into fiat, does very little for hijra. The proper posture here is self-custody, direct verification, connection to one’s own node, and the use of privacy-preserving tools that keep one’s financial life from becoming another transparent feed for hostile institutions and chain surveillance companies. Understand that Bitcoin, far from being just a side note to Digital Hijra, is the monetary backbone that makes the rest of it economically viable over the long term.
Once the monetary layer is in place, the social layer begins to look different as well. Muslims still need to find each other, teach each other, coordinate, trade, build, and sustain communities across distance, but legacy social media only permits this through systems built around attention extraction, algorithmic manipulation, identity capture, and the constant threat of censorship. The Nostr protocol is important here because it points toward a different model of digital association and communication, one not governed by a single corporate authority and not dependent on the approval of platform managers to remain visible or economically active. One of its most important features is that it allows value to move natively through the network itself. Through zaps, where users send each other bitcoin over the lightning network, people can directly support writers, builders, teachers, merchants, and content creators without needing to satisfy the criteria of Faglon, Zuckerfag, JewTube, Stripe, Patreon, or some other gatekeeper before being allowed to earn. That point matters more than people sometimes realize. It means a Muslim does not have to build an audience on a legacy platform, beg to be monetized, submit identity documents, route everything through fiat processors, and hope the terms of service do not suddenly shift. He can be supported directly by his tribe in a truly sovereign and permissionless way.
In that sense, Nostr should not only be thought as a better communications layer. It is a social layer built on sovereign rails, where artistic and intellectual expression and economic and social coordination can begin to converge without being broken apart by hostile intermediaries. It goes without saying that it does not mean every use of Nostr is automatically noble or that it is immune from slop. Human beings drag their weaknesses into every environment they touch. But the architecture at least makes room for a healthier and more direct form of digital sociality than the one we have been trained to accept.
Once these foundations are in view, a wider field of supporting tools begins to make sense. Tor matters because private routing and remote access matter. Self-hosting matters because there is a major difference between using a service and actually running the thing yourself. Alternative media tools matter because there is no reason Muslims should remain trapped in the degenerate cultural pipelines of legacy streaming platforms when better habits and infrastructure can be cultivated elsewhere. Open source software, encrypted communications, reproducible software, personal servers, open hardware where possible, shared repositories of trusted tools, all of these become part of the broader ecology of Digital Hijra.
Not every Muslim will begin at the same place, and not everyone needs to adopt the exact same stack in the exact same order. That is not the point. The point is that once a person starts seeing digital life through the lens of vicegerency, he will begin to recognize that there are many ways of pushing outward from dependency and many layers at which meaningful change can occur.
The Task Ahead
Digital Hijra, then, is not a one-time migration completed the moment you install a new operating system, buy a hardware wallet, generate a set of private and public keys, or make an account on an uncensorable network. It is an ongoing discipline. The tools will change and the threats will continuously evolve. New enclosures will emerge, new creative methods of capture will appear, and the forces that profit from passivity will continue adjusting their methods. The Muslim making Digital Hijra has to remain awake to this pattern and learn how to navigate it. He has to keep learning, testing, refining, synthesizing, recombining, and building. He has to become comfortable with iteration. This is not because novelty is some virtue, but because vigilance is now part of faithfulness in digital life. The enemy adapts, and so must the one trying to remain intact.
For that reason, Digital Hijra should not be framed as an optional hobby for technically curious Muslims, nor as a luxury for a niche subculture of privacy enthusiasts. It is becoming a basic responsibility for anyone who recognizes the degree to which modern digital systems now mediate belief, attention, memory, communication, money, and social life. Understand that no scholar, state, or institution is coming to hand Muslims a ready-made path out of this condition. Get this idea out of your head. And even if they tried, outsourcing the problem would only reproduce the same passivity that we need to escape from.
The task now is to begin where one can, at whatever layer one can, and to do so with seriousness. Run Linux. Run GrapheneOS. Hold Bitcoin in self-custody and use it as money as it was meant to be used. Use and build on Nostr. Explore Tor, self-hosting, and the broader world of open source tools that make greater sovereignty possible. "FOSS or nothing."[8]
Begin imperfectly if you must, but begin.
If the dominant digital order works by deterritorializing Muslim life, uprooting it from stable forms of ownership, discipline, privacy, and moral agency, and then trapping it in reactive attempts to rebuild on modernity’s own terms, then Digital Hijra must refuse that cycle altogether.
It is the slow and deliberate work of rooting digital life back into infrastructures, habits, and forms of association ordered toward responsibility and vicegerency before Allah (swt). That is what this ultimately is. Not a change of apps and platforms, but a change of ground.
Footnotes:
1. https://saif.systems/articles/islam-between-east-and-west-part-1.html]l
2. See list of anti-zionist apps here: https://techforpalestine.org/projects
3. https://www.newarab.com/news/google-reinstates-palestinian-upscrolled-app-after-brief-ban
4. See this article that talks about three separate instances in which LaunchGood was debanked: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/4/4/banking-as-an-american-muslim-its-a-horror
5. See A Cypherpunk's Manifesto: https://cdn.nakamotoinstitute.org/docs/cypherpunk-manifesto.txt
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudo#/media/File%3ASudo_warning.svg
The problem with modern technology is not that it is synthetic or far removed from raw materials, it's that it is usually built inside systems of riba, surveillance, dependency, and enclosure.
Digital Hijra is a call to rebuild technological life in a vicegerent way, on sovereignty, ownership, moral discipline, and accountable infrastructure. This is where Wahdat al-Wujud should lead us to as we navigate hypermodernity.