Attention is a unit of commerce, a commodity and weapon - it is all of this at once and more. In the canon of Islamicate Sufic authors, attention was at the core of spiritual rejuvenation. Attention and the gaze of man was meant to be directed to the Divine alone but man all too soon realized there were many ailments that poisoned the mind and body, preventing access to the Source. The authors of tasawwuf then in one sense were keen diagnosticians, aware of precognitive frames that hindered man to not fully utilize attention and direct it to where it needed to go.
To conquer the ailments and treat them was a far simpler task a century ago, perhaps even a decade or so ago. Now attention is increasingly anchored primarily in cyberspace, contested not merely by traditional typologies of spontaneous sin like lust and greed but well coordinated nation-state actors, intelligence agencies and propaganda machines - well funded, well financed and often well researched.
One recourse for the Muslim is to lean into Luddite retreat. Cyberspace is simply inhospitable to Islam. Cyberspace is not a space that is commensurate with Islamic sensibilities and sentiment. It cannot be conquered, it cannot be redesigned or realigned. However, to concede the loss of cyberspace is for the believer to unwittingly concede the lack of one's own capacity to bear witness to God's Revelation in the Time that he has allotted to us.
It also does not understand that the nature of statecraft, commerce, monetary activity and intellectual generation will primarily be cyber in the years to come. Action will inevitably be local, but the generative impulses for it can be done in online networks that recognize Muslim plurality as a feature and not a bug. Cyberspace will be contested by nation-state blocs, empires, corporations and radical private actors. It seems perplexing that some Muslims choose to abandon this field, nor even consider its utility in terms of formulating new political configurations centered around the Divine.
Another alternative, is to use cyberspace as terrain for rehashing old battles because there is simply no imagination, vision or will to conceptualize New Islamicate futures. These debates in the past were not centrally generative of any real political project, but often relied on patronage from the Islamic Secular who envisioned a civlizational vision much larger than the often parochial concerns of the jurist-class.
In this vision, the mimetic potential of cyber virality repackages marginal concerns of the ancient jurist-class into a mistaken centrality in the project of civilizational anchoring. For example the legality of the Mawlid occupies centrality in cyber-articulations of "Islamicness" - an odd and pathetic use of the potentials of digital discourse. Dawah Inc has catapulted a whole raft of wholly irrelevant concerns and granted them as somehow the be all and end all of civilizational renewal. It creates a class of Muslims who see the negotiation of such question as the be all and end all to the question of how Islam engages today and in the future. It fosters a false sense of a febrile zero sum game that gives rise to interesting psychopathologies.
Both these approaches cocoon the believer from the realities of the age, it creates cognitive dissonance. It leads to a distorted sense of the heritage of all those who labored for Islamicate Sovereignty which if one mines the historical archives were a far more expansive set of actors than just the jurist-class. The Muslim modern is orphaned from the larger chain of those who worked towards Islamicate Sovereignty.
This has created, whether the participants are aware of this or not - a profound sense of alienation for the vast majority of believers who are not invested in Dawah Inc or the ongoing attempts at self-preservation of a failing jurist-class that have been unduly burdened with unreasonable expectations packaged with responsibilities and obligations it is not equipped to deal with. It can be argued that in the past there was no expectation that the jurist-class was meant to be the generative site for renewal and configuration of new novel forms of political and social configuration. Fiqh was never in the business of culture-making the foundations for political order. The juristic class of course were relied upon to be a bedrock of stability in whatever political configuration was hashed out, contested and arrived at.
At a basic level, today the impoverishment, weakness and humiliation of post-colonial Muslim states sparks a transhistorical sense of collective guilt and remorse which forges communal belonging that often boils down to "We can do better, we must do better". However, where do these believers turn to in between Luddites and Dawah Inc?
Those who are not well versed in these arcane debates are somehow made to feel as if they have no real part to play in the story of Islamicate civilizations in this century and beyond. They do believe in the gaze of God, the promises of His Messenger ﷺ and the reality of the Last Day, but there is no sense of network or anchoring either in meatspace or cyber that allows them to labour in this cause without being caught up in baboonery.
Much can and should also be said about other chasms in the Muslim attention-economy - ethno-narcissism, ghettoisation, perplexing nationalisms - perhaps for another time.
So what is the state of the Muslim "attention-economy" so to speak? It is dire. We have lost potential networks of the Islamic Secular within cyber, that could have laboured towards Islamicate Sovereignty, that have as much an authentic role (indeed even more so) than the jurist-class or the Dawah Inc media market merchants. Fixing the attention-economy in cyber is necessary - dragging the timeline towards sanity away from delirium and perhaps most of all denial of the tasks at hand.
And truly God knows best
I wonder what you make of ghettoisation with a kind eye to popular forms of tasawwuf whose idea includes appeal to specific forms of humble display (threadbare clothing; barefoot motion; guarding against debate or intelligence) and other examples may be known of.