Self and Secrecy

Neither icons nor images but rather linguistic signs and ciphers prevail in Arabo-Islamic productions.’ Derived from the Arabic word (sifr, safr) that means “vacant, empty,” the word cipher is especially meaningful here because its semantics embrace meanings related to secrecy and revelation (for example, deciphering and ciphering).

I read Khan's Self and Secrecy with great interest because I think there is a critical relationship that is yet to be explored between what we can conceptualize as The Machine which is the overwhelming power of Technology, this pervasiveness of the digital into every facet of our lives and the Quranic conception of the Self. Khan's argument is that within the Quran there is somewhat of a dichotomy between the transparent self who is in front of God, who can hide no secrets, who can keep no fact hidden, who is subjected to the intensity of the Divine's gaze as a catalyst for tremendous moral and ethical transformation and the public self.

The public self of course is capable of quite cruel manifestations of deception and deceit, and using secrecy in all sorts of chaotic and corrosive ways. The examples to illustrate this are evident throughout the Qur'anic narrative; sins such as hypocrisy, ostentation, dishonesty and pride, which all involve in one aspect or another deception of some sort. And Khan makes the very excellent point throughout the book that the Qur'anic narrative is really about how truth can be negotiated or rather arrived at through the pitfalls of deception, illusion, delusion, self-loathing, self-deceit, and arrogance, which all act as ways of covering up the truth, that all act as ways of hiding the truth from the world from one's heart.

Yet at the same time there is also a positive notion of the public self where one can exercise discretion for virtue. The best way one can exercise discretion is through the restraint of the tongue, through the restraint of the eyes, through the restraint of the hands. This spiritual journey, involves humans acknowledging that these faculties of sight, touch, and sensory experience have to all be reined in within a rubric of sacred monotony and ritual to prevent chaos and fitna on earth. So, in one respect, discretion therefore becomes a necessary part of one's moral transformation. Discretion is what leads to humility and what leads to patience. Discretion forms part of the trigger to grant individuals the insight that repentance is required to establish inner equilibrium. Forgiveness is intrinsically tied to a conception of God covering up our sins, God covering up our mistakes, God exercising discretion through His Mercy and Compassion, so that our transgressions are not revealed to others in creation. All this moral activity happens under the direct gaze of the Almighty, a point that Khan emphasizes:

God has a panoptic gaze, for seeing and knowing are intimately linked in the Qur’anic lexicon of secrecy and revelation. This idea that nothing can be hidden from God, that God is all-aware and all-knowing and all-attesting, can be looked upon as having a tremendous psychical import for believers.

The Divine Panopticon functions because there is a tapestry of veiling that criss-crosses through it - these are the veils of Mercy and Compassion, access to these veils over our faults is also open to all through the act of tawba. Such a tapestry is stripped down and absent in the post-Enlightenment logic of the Machine State.

Khan thus juxtaposes the transparency of the self-revealment of God with the need to create spheres of privacy and secrecy vis-à-vis creation and people. I think that's a very important point which is reflected in Islamicate culture and civilization where there was a constant concern about concealment. And you can see this in Islamicate architecture with inner courtyards and gardens which are centralized and windows are inward rather than outward and even in terms of the art which is primarily geometric and logocentric (calligraphy). And this spiritual focus on secrecy, metaphor, the tension between the outward form and inward reality - it bleeds into the culture coupled with the sacred injunction against idolatry in terms of iconoclastic art that eschews the physical form for the geometric form and within the geometric form lies a potential space for real deep metaphysical and spiritual reflection about the Divine.

However, what I find interesting here is what is left unexplored by Khan (simply because it is outside the remit of the book) - namely that in order to allow for this logocentric literary-based culture of privacy and secrecy to form, in order to create a hyper-spiritualized formation of the self, it required a certain space and a certain pseudonymity/anonymity in terms of cultural production.

The cultural production within the Islamicate world was not centralized. It was not under the auspices of a digital panopticon. There was no clean and real definitive way to tie authorship to cultural production, which is why throughout Islamicate history, there's always been disputes about authors. There's always been the case of pseudonymous authors and scholars and literary personalities writing under different names, whether it was to avoid persecution, scrutiny and social pressure. With the Word of God becoming a Book - a culture of endlessly industrious commentary and meta-commentary is born that is renewed and refreshed every generation.

This becomes much more difficult if you have a nation state which is aggressively and malignantly expanding its technological footprint into every aspect of its citizens' lives. And in doing so, with the digital panopticon, the state is setting itself up as a rival to the gaze of the Divine. A state that is increasingly bureaucratizing religion by forming 'Ministries of Truth' that try to arbitrate definitively in the "deathless questions" of the Islamicate.

The Divine Panoptic Gaze for the believer is layered - imprinted not just with fear, the Fire and wrath but with mercy, rife with the promise of forgiveness, discretion and compassion. The State's Panoptic Gaze only carries with it the promise of oppression. A Cybernetic State inevitably creates a brusque flatness that does not tolerate or permit any real exploration of the Self beyond aesthetic wrappers over the contemporary State doctrine (whatever it may be).

Moreover, this is no longer just a problem in relation to the State, today's American Imperial civilization blurs public and private lines. The challenge in delineating public from private has allowed corporations like Google to wield a formidable epistemic power akin to 20th-century nation-states due to their intricate and dense feudal-digital footprint. Companies perhaps have outdone States in constructing detailed digital profiles about each of us, which is then leveraged to wage cognitive and spiritual war to aggressively expand the "attention economy" that increasingly magnifies the vulgar and obscene over the sublime and beauty.

The key point is that individuals start to unconsciously and consciously self-regulate their cultural production within corporate-enforced material boundaries. The Google ecosystem amongst others such as Meta acts as a trap, endlessly confining individuals within it, shaping and distorting their epistemic and spiritual horizons, whilst offering hostile State actors total access to carefully collated digital-psychological profiling.

An Islamic design of the State is impossible for many reasons, but one of them is because the only Being the Muslim submits to as having a Panopticon Gaze is God alone. No one else is allowed to have an omniscient presence in one's life. A cryptographic maximalist approach to statecraft and identity can potentially still revive the material conditions and create the political economy for an Islamicate Renaissance that once again operates under the Divine Gaze alone.