serkan zorba's blog

Image credit As anti-Muslim sentiment is being carefully curated by design, yet again—in part to distract public attention from the genocide in Gaza and to normalize hostility toward Muslims—troll armies have taken to mocking the claim that “Islam is a religion of peace.” As has often been the case, many fundamentalists end up converging with Islamophobes on the very question of what Islam is, what its goals are, and what its methodologies entail. These fundamentalists hijack authentic Islam and weave a narrative that is alien to the Qur’an and deleterious to Muslims. They vehemently reject the claim that “Islam means peace,” thereby conceding the definitional ground to Islam’s critics. This is my short response to these perspectives: Peace is an outlook, an orientation to life—an ontological attitude toward being. At its core, Islam is about seeking peace, harmony, and resonance with oneself and the rest of creation through submission to God. The pursuit of peace, both at the individ...

In a striking prophecy, Prophet Muhammad foretells that the perception of time will accelerate as the end times approach: "The Hour will not be established until time passes rapidly, such that a year is like a month, a month is like a week, a week is like a day, a day is like an hour, and an hour is like the flicker of a flame." (Sunan al-Tirmidhī, Hadith 2332) Although Muhammad (ﷺ) did not explicitly mention technology, the effect he described—time passing increasingly rapidly—aligns closely with what we now recognize in modern times: technology has made time feel progressively faster. While perspicacious ancient thinkers such as Seneca and Saint Augustine drew attention to the subjective nature of time (Seneca, 2004; Augustine, 1991), it is only recently that philosophers have explored how technology accelerates our perception of time. Notably, modern philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler distinguish between “originary” time and “artificial” time. The form...