Religious life and the effects of technological culture

I was reading an interview of Albert Borgmann when one of his replies to the interviewer stood out. His point about Church life and the technological culture is equally applicable to other religions including Islam. Consider the following excerpt

In church life we talk often of the effects of technological culture. For instance, we are concerned about the influences that come through television and the Internet. But we do not some to have a way of talking about the fabric of life that technology stitches us into.

That is part of the general reluctance to take the measure of contemporary culture. For a large part of the technological era, roughly from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th, technology was very beneficial. It remedied the miseries of hunger, confinement and illness. And then it imperceptibly moved to colonize the center of life. And I think one reason for the lack of response must be this imperceptible movement. People didn’t know when to say stop, to say: this far but no further.

Another reason is that the whole movement of technology is so deeply rooted in the economy. We think that the economy can’t exist in the it does unless there is more production and consumption.

A third reason for embracing technology might be the understandable desire to embrace what’s distinctive about our culture. It’s difficult to accept the notion that the things that are most characteristic of our lives should not be most central.

One more factor is very powerful in shielding technology from examination: liberal democratic individualism – the notion that the individual is to be the judge of what is the good life for him or her. In the abstract it sounds like a wonderful principle, and there’s a lot of important reality to it. But it makes it very difficult to generate a meaningful examination of our culture, which inevitably is a common and collective enterprise.

Divorce – The Instant Messaging Way

People try to avoid face to face interaction with other people if it involve something unpleasent. It seems easier to say or even do things if the person on the other side of the conversation is faceless. To some extent this is the case with telephones. SMS and instant messaging takes this to the next level. In addition to being faceless the person on the other side of the conversation does not even have a voice. Different aspects and even levels of embodiment encourage different types of social interaction. In the case of SMS and instant messaging, people find it easier to easier to say things that they would otherwise find relatively difficult to do. Enter Triple Talaqs, a topic which has gained some controversy in recent years. In a Triple Talaq a man can divorce his wife by uttering the T word thrice and he is ‘off the hook.’ In some Muslim countries Muslim men have divorced their wives by SMSing or texting their wives the T message three times. This issue came into the mainstream media a few years ago in Malaysia when some Malaysian Muslims divorced their wives using SMS on their cell phones. At that time Azalina Othman of UMNO rightly observed that such actions trivialize divorce. However for many such men unfortunately divorce is a trivial thing. The whole SMS divorce affair even went to the courts in Malaysia but the courts ruled in favor of the legality of the divorce. The controversy has not quite died down in recent years as the courts later on declared that giving such divorces via SMS was an offense if the husbands do not seek permission from the shariah court. These issues would not arise if the such SMS divorces were declared illegal. Given the propensity of some men to use rules for their advantage it would not be far off into the future when some Muslim man would divorce his wife’s character in the Second Life or even in the Sims and demand that it should be taken seriously in the real life. Loti Zadeh observed that if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. Thus if the laws of the land do not reflect the state of the technology and do not take into account the inclination of some men to abuse rules then SMS would seem like a viable option for pronouncing divorce for those people since they do not have to think about the emotional issues and even forgo the emotional reaction of their wives.

The First Word

The title of the blog is a concatenation of the terms Islamicate and Homo Faber. An explanation of these two terms are in order first. The term Islamicate originated with Marshall Hodgson the following quote from Hodgson, via the Islamicate blog, pretty much explains what it means.

The term Islamicate comes from , who defined it as something that “…would refer not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims.”(Venture of Islam, v. 1, p. 59)

As for why Islamicate and why not Islamic, Muslim or even Homo Islamicus, I have deliberately avoided using the term Homo Islamicus to broaden the scope of discussion to broaden the focus. The idea is critique the way things are in the Islamic world and beyond and not just on why the way things should be. In Latin Homo Faber means ‘Man the maker.’ Especially in Philosophy of Technology, human beings are conceptualized as tool making creatures. This is the other important theme in this blog – the relationship of technology with humankind. Taken together, these two themes mean that we will be discussing the impact of technology on Islamicate culture, it appropriation by the masses, the reaction of the ulema (sometimes reactionary actions), Islamic and Islamicate thinking on technology etc. In short, we hope to have an intelligent discussion on Technology and all things. Let the blogging begin.

Update: Fixed the typos.