Notes On FitnaPunk
FitnaPunk: high technology and low futuwwa, instantaneous high technology and liquid modernity fused with collapsing soulcraft. Technology itself is forever frozen and ossified as a leveraged form of extrastate craft, but remains unexplored as terrain for mastery and sovereignty. One must pay debts to those who build with silicon.
In FitnaPunk, amongst sprawling metropolises and silicon jungles and computational races, we are lost and deformed and just like fitna, there is an acidity to it that dissolves everything all at once - civilizational arson. The Centre is lost, drifting into the abyss without shelter, without refuge. Flames of techno-capital ravaging all around us. Karachi is FitnaPunk. Cairo is FitnaPunk - cesspools with Instagram Shorts blaring out in every street corner and every living thing captured by the GAE Cybernetic State via vectoralist/platform capture.
Perhaps the greatest aspect of FitnaPunk is the passivity of it all, the apathy of it all. We're unable to resist it, unable to combat it. More often than not apathy is tragedy. It is the inability of Ihsan to burst through. It is the failure of the Ishmaelite to refashion and reforge virtue amidst the conditions and the cycles of the new century. Or what is perhaps more nauseating is the retreat into silos and ghettos of contrived virtue, which is neither real nor meaningful (for example, Christian-style Islamo-evangelical pop culture or prosperity gospels or any other fad of the algorithm that pushes for hyper-financialization via parasocial engagement). Authenticity and rebellion, which is at the heart of what it is to be someone who is God-conscious, is lost amidst the hyper-optimization of algorithms and the ever-omniscient juggernaut of technocapital. In FitnaPunk, there are no happy endings. The corrupting tragedy of it is that the question of technology should have emboldened Islam as the ultimate mimetic force to conquer souls, and yet it has become one mundane option, one skin amongst many, a costume in a circus of illusion and delusion that keeps us entrapped and distracted, held hostage to the cogwar horrors and designs of others. FitnaPunk, in many senses, will (if it hasn't already) become the default iteration of the way computational reality is embedded within the Old Islamicate.
What does FitnaPunk look like? FitnaPunk is state-appointed muftis working under the aegis of AI/LLM-driven algorithms that censor, edit, and manipulate the words of scholars into an anaesthetic that douses the potentiality of the Old Islamicate. Whatever little of it is left anyway. It is garbage culture on Meta Platforms where the secular elites choose to adopt the worst aspects of the Occident because such is the fate of all biomass. It is to create golden, gilded cages of prosperity linked to a certain docility and loyalty to all political forms that have failed us and have led us to catastrophe and tragedy over and over again. It is the creation of artificial media markets such as Dawah Inc that only condemn Islam as another form of identity bartering. In the cruelest sense, FitnaPunk relativizes Islam causing it to fizzile out, no longer as a force for potential, an original cultural wellspring of chaotic productive instability.
FitnaPunk has built for us concrete wastelands of neon-soaked resignation.
And truly God knows best