The Future of Muslim Tech: Prospects and Challenges

Among the users of modern, disruptive technologies are around two billion Muslims for whom, like everyone else, technologies such as search engines, social media, online lending platforms and AI technologies are increasingly becoming a part of their daily lives. Recent as the call for a fair and ethically driven design and use of new technology may be, it’s an agenda which is now mostly formulated in the privileged labs and board rooms of the global North, leaving yet little room for the majority of the world’s users to define and decide what to them is ethically just or what for them a technologically acceptable future will and should look like. The dominant role of new emergent technologies raises the question of what humankind wishes to be, now that humans and their technologies mutually seem to be imbricated.

Our workshop aims to redress global imbalances by discussing the need for an ethics of new technology by injecting it with questions such as what ethics in design and use may mean in other parts of the world less heard and listened to. What could such a diverse ethics, for example, do in posing new categories of social communications, innovative means of bringing people together from different colours, ideologies, and faiths enacting virtual rules in newly emergent virtual communities to ensure the safety and (mental) health of all users. We also ask the question how in foregrounding the disruptive potential of future technologies tech-developers/engineers can be responsible innovators?

The Future of Muslim Tech Workshop proposes an interdisciplinary inquiry located at the intersection of Digital Anthropology, Islamic studies, Science & Technology, Computer Science and Media and Area studies, bringing together academics with religious spokes people, cultural activists, policy makers and representatives of the tech sector. It seeks to align various stakeholders on the question of how to build the field of ethics and technology in Muslim markets, and to subsequently collaboratively set the direction for future work in the field.