Conclusion: Wounds Unwound
Can I write 25,000 words? Yes. Did I learn anything? Also yes.
The Four Recenterings, V: Conclusion.
In 1732, İbrahim Müteferrika prepped for a fight. He printed the Earth moving around the Sun, called it abhorrent, and left wide margins so readers could refute it properly. The brawl he expected never came.
I hadn’t planned to spend much time on this stuff. I was trying to understand AI, and I had gotten tired of what I was reading. Another video, another paper, another symposium on what AI means for humanity. Consciousness. The soul. Whether AI can really know anything at all. I wanted to know whether we had done this before.
Then, as I wrote in the introduction, I read a paper calling AI the fourth decentering revolution, after Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. Freud had drawn up the original list in 1917, three outrages to our naïve self-love. What struck me was that I couldn’t recognize the Muslim version of any of them.
So I went looking. Months, around twenty-five thousand words. Most of that time was spent reading rather than writing. I tried to sell the project before I started publishing it. Nobody bought it. It didn’t really matter, since I was going to do it anyway.
What I wanted was clarity. I wanted to know what my tradition did when the world seemed to turn upside down, because I wanted some way of judging whether this moment is as unprecedented as people keep saying.
The introduction to this series ends with a sentence I would now write differently. These essays follow Islam’s reply.
Sort of. Copernicus barely landed — human worth was sitting where astronomers couldn’t reach. Darwin caused more trouble, so Adam became the line in the sand. Freud got thirty years of being cool before everyone picked a room, shut the door, and stopped reading each other. AI got pulled over and taken to court.
Every time, before anyone got around to asking where human dignity belonged, someone had usually slapped a label: “ours” or “theirs,” “Islamic” or “Western.” Once that stamp went on, the rest of the argument followed. Call it bordering.
So, as promised, a few words for the border patrol.
The first problem is that the line won’t hold still. Müteferrika went looking for it in 1732 and found nobody guarding it. Two centuries later Ahmad Raza Khan was fighting astronomy with a bird that could never quite reach its nest. Ismail Mazhar spent thirty years separating Darwin’s biology from Büchner’s materialism, until nobody wanted the distinction. Yusuf Murad’s journal, where a Sufi shaykh and a criminal lawyer published as equals, stopped printing in 1953. The border is a pencil line that keeps moving.
The second problem is that customs has never been much good at its job. Malik Badri arrived at the checkpoint insisting that Muslim psychology free itself from Western psychology, with Karen Horney and Henri Ellenberger in his luggage. Muhammad Faruque holds up Suhrawardī with Whitehead in the trunk. The most popular Islamic chatbot runs on the same computer programs as everyone else’s.
Traffic goes the other way too. In 1957, Muhammad Muhammad Husayn blamed a Jewish conspiracy for Darwin, Marx and Nietzsche, then got to Freud and reminded readers that he, too, was a Jew. The evidence came from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Tsarist forgery that reached Cairo by translation and cheap print, then got put to work explaining what “the West” was doing to “us.” It’s a bit like importing steel from Mexico to build Trump’s wall.
People are even harder to sort. There was a Transylvanian convert with a printing license, and a Hindu maharaja astronomer, and a Greek Orthodox Egyptian who became a Catholic and then gave Arabic its word for the unconscious by lifting it out of Ibn ʿArabī. There was a Sudanese therapist reading a paper to an Islamic convention in Indianapolis, and a scholar in Britain comparing a robot vacuum to the jinn.
I had been calling this Islam’s reply. By the fourth essay I wasn’t sure why reply is in the singular form. Several of these people wouldn’t have recognized each other as colleagues.
Some of their answers stuck anyway, and after a while those answers became the Islamic position on evolution. The Muslim response to Freud. The Islamic approach to AI. Is it really thinkers who add “the,” or is it institutions? Maybe I was looking in the wrong place.
So I tried a shortcut: find the person who got it right.
For a while, I settled on Muhammad Iqbal.
He kept turning up. He took Einstein as a prophet of light while Raza Khan was still on Newton. He accepted evolution and refused blind chance. He credited Freud with real service to religion while seriously engaging with his work. And he called the work reconstruction. I want to reconstruct too. For a while, that was going to be my ending.
Then I remembered the line in Jawab-e Shikwa: “How can a race as Muslims pass who shame even the Jews?”
Cringe. I dug deeper and found more antisemitic poetry. Then it kept happening. Murad built the coolest intellectual space in this story, and then went to work for a despotic state. So did the folks working on “Islamic” AI in service of the current slate of Middle Eastern despots. Badri saw something real about intellectual dependency but ended up writing about Jewish lizards’ holes. The people I admired kept making me feel uncomfortable.
That bothered me more than I expected. Some part of me had assumed I was supposed to reconcile the world I actually live in with the tradition I inherited, as though Islam sat on one side, everything called “Western” sat on the other, and my job was to figure out how the pieces fit.
Four months of reading made me less sure there are two pieces. The border was real enough for some. People had built institutions around it and sometimes punished people for crossing it. But it was also something artificial.
Realizing that was a relief. I didn’t have to choose a side, or find one perfect Islamic answer to tell me where to stand. I could inherit what was mine, argue with it, borrow, reject, reconstruct. Everyone was doing some version of that anyway.
So where did the center go?
One verse kept nagging at me: “We offered the trust to the heavens and the earth and the mountains, but they declined to bear it, being fearful of it. But humanity assumed it…” We don’t have to be the smartest thing in the room, or the “most” anything. We are addressed, and we answer.
