A Muslim Treatise Against AI

The Profane Science Behind Large Language Models

Bismillah Al Rahman Al Raheem

In my previous post on Islamic Economics and Marxism, I spoke of how riba’—usury— is the basis of the capitalist economy. Interest is one principal way in which riba’ is operationalized, and the way in which large banks and capitalist firms make money from their money. There is no need to revisit that article at length or expand more on the concept of riba’, instead I want to explore shirk or ‘associating partners with God’ as a basis of the current American, “Israeli”, and European tech boom, especially surrounding large language models (LLMs) which are mistakenly called artificial intelligence (AI). I will use LLM and AI interchangeably for clarity, because that is the common parlance. The article will begin with a novel economic exploration of the concept of shirk, which is often just considered to be paganism, polytheism, or calling certain prophets, angels, or djinn gods themselves. The next section will carry on the theoretical groundwork, using Rene Guenon’s concept of profane science to describe the last 100 years of technological developments. The following section will be a critique of the AI industry, the exploitation involved, and the destruction of the environment which is a consequence of hyperscale data centers that accommodate the microchips used in processing sequences of the LLM itself. The aforementioned section will—like my previous article—blend Islamic and Marxist economic discourses in order to round out the critique of this industry.

A few disclaimers are in order before I carry on. Firstly, being a curious and inquisitive man, I have used the Chinese DeepSeek system to see its capabilities through asking it questions about my AC and DC theory homework (bases of electrical theory). My rejection of technology is not absolute; I am not a Luddite or any other such person who rejects tech wholesale, I merely understand that it has damaged our society and diverted our attention from other interventions which could benefit the many, not just the few. Secondly, I am sure our dear departed Rene Guenon would be frustrated that I am operationalizing his concepts and writings to make interventions in the political and economic sphere, being that he was always writing from the metaphysical perspective of traditional principles. Nonetheless, I have degrees in political science and international relations, I couldn’t help myself.

Shirk—Associationism and its Effects

Shirk is seen by many Muslims as the ultimate sin, and I tend to agree. By engaging in shirk we are rejecting tawhid—the absolute Oneness of Allah (swt). In the time of the Prophet Muhammad (saws), the main way in which shirk expressed itself was twofold. Firstly, through pagan syncretism with Christianity and Judaism, which had already been present in the Arabian Peninsula for some time. Secondly, through the pre-monotheistic Arab pantheon. These Arab pagan-syncretists believed that angels were the daughters of Allah, while burying their infant daughters in the sand for the shame of not having a son. The irony is both astounding and devastating but affirms that Islam was sent as a mercy on mankind, especially to women of the day. The Arab pantheon included many gods and goddesses who, like in other polytheist societies of the time, represented earth, wind, fire, water, rain, death, lightning, and all manner of natural phenomena. Being that the Prophet (saws) was sent after the Council of Nicaea, the non-trinitarian believers had been purged from the church and what remained were trinitarians who believed that the Prophet Issa (as) was the son of God. This is another form of shirk, which the Prophet Issa (as) himself rejects in the Quran.

Much has been written about shirk from this standpoint, here I want to expand the concept to account for the ways in which our economic system—capitalism—encourages and bakes shirk into its very DNA. The worship of money which takes place under capitalism does not require actual prostration before piles of money, but its effect is all the same. The billionaire class want to replace God in their power, fame, wealth, and influence. Elon Musk’s fantastical plans to colonize space and put human life on Mars fly in the face of the fact that Allah made life on this planet, and while Allah is the lord of worlds, we as humans cannot make those worlds possible. Only Allah knows where else life in this universe is or may be. Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison’s dream of a massive surveillance state seeks to replace Allah as the All Seeing. They dream of surveilling all workers and extracting every bit of value from us while denying us the simple pleasures of life. They want us to have nothing and be happy about it. But as we know, Allah has stated otherwise:

Do not think Oh Prophet that God is unaware of what the unjust do. He only delays them until a Day when their eyes will stare in horror (Quran 14:42)

Economically, their shirk is premised on an impossible equation: they want unlimited economic growth in a world-system with finite resources. Their exploitation is based on the extraction of our surplus labor.

In the world of AI, shirk has found its apex. A company called Anthropic is having a hyperscale data center built for them by Amazon Web Services. According to The New York Times:

…the AI start-up Anthropic…aims to create an AI system that matches the human brain

There is nothing more arrogant or insane as trying to replicate Allah’s perfect creation, yet these companies exist and currently have the power, money, and influence in our society. As those who have heard of the map-territory relation should well know, the representation of the thing is not the thing itself. We are in a world where Anthropic will spend money and time trying to map and recreate every detail of the human brain that they will destroy the human brain in the process. They will poison the earth trying to be God. This is a profane science about which Rene Guenon warned us 100 years ago.

Profane Sciences Are the Foundation of Capitalist Expansion

In his masterpiece The Crisis of the Modern World, Rene Guenon warned of the proliferation of profane sciences, which are obsessed with the material world. According to him, this is a sign of the times, where there has been a descent towards the purely and crudely material and away from the spiritual and divine. Using the Hindu cosmological cycles to explore historical time, Guenon shows how our current Manvantara is called the Kali Yuga or the Dark Age. In the Kali Yuga, there will be a descent in thought towards the purely material, degrading thought to a confused and unjust state.

In assuming its modern form, science has lost not only in depth but also, one might say, in stability, for its attachment to principles enabled it to share in their immutability to the extent that its subject-matter allowed, whereas now being completely confined to the world of change, it can find nothing that is stable, and no fixed point on which to base itself; no longer starting from any absolute certainty, it is reduced to probabilities and approximations, or to purely hypothetical constructions that are the product of mere individual fantasy

It is the pure fantasy of the boardroom executives of Anthropic to recreate the human brain out of microchips. They think of themselves as gods, able to will life into existence through the computer. It is deeply embarrassing stuff, yet they are so high on their own power that they fancy themselves geniuses.

Guenon argues that what passes as technological advancement is actually no such thing. He believes it to be nothing but the production of disequilibrium, which corresponds to the Marxist understanding of the business cycle. Let us compare Guenon’s analysis with that of Samir Amin, one of the premier Marxist economists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. On the system of science in the Kali Yuga, Guenon argues:

Here again we have dispersion, viewed from a different angle and at a more advanced stage: it could be described as a tendency towards instantaneity, having for its limit a state of pure disequilibrium, which, were it possible, would coincide with the final dissolution of this world; and this too is one of the clearest signs that the final phase of the Kali Yuga is at hand.

This tendency towards instantaneity and disequilibrium coincides with the crisis in the capitalist-imperialist system, in which exploitation, injury, and harm to workers is obscured by Amazon deliveries which can place a commodity at your doorstep within 24 hours, for example. According to Samir Amin:

By its very nature capitalist accumulation has always been synonymous with disorder, in the sense that Marx gave to that term: a system moving from disequilibrium to disequilibrium (driven by class struggles and conflicts among the powers) without ever tending toward an equilibrium.

While the world looks on in horror at the Zionist genocide in Gaza, they are blinded to the other side of the coin, so to speak. The more that the western governments spend upholding the Zionist colony, the more immiserated their own people become. Social security, social safety nets, and healthcare budgets are all on the chopping block while billions are added to the defense and tech budgets. The Zionist colony’s use of AI is even more despicable than Anthropic, because rather than desecrating God’s creation, the AI systems ‘Lavender’ and ‘Where’s Daddy’ are used to destroy women, children, men, the elderly and disabled.

As

Sermons at the Court

eloquently put it in their recent article:

Their bloodlusting rampage has resumed because Yarvin, Trump, Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and the other Death Eaters of this era really think they are gods, that they are unstoppable, that they can get away with genocide, and erase the native, reverent population of Gaza without any retribution or consequences.

The profane sciences which drive the likes of our current tech oligarchy, and their fascist acolytes are like the ouroboros—the snake eating its own tail. Quoting the Quran again,

Sermons at the Court

shows how Allah has already prepared us for this battle:

“And so We have placed in every society the most wicked to conspire in it. Yet they plot only against themselves, but they fail to perceive it.” (Qur’an 6:123)

These ghouls plot against themselves and sow the destruction of themselves and the world through their schemes. Guenon was keen to this fact 100 years ago, when he showed how the profane sciences are what guides these oligarchs and their thralls. Their development of technology, which only has the aim of creating more wealth at the expense of the earth is a sign of the times. It is a sign that we are deep in the Kali Yuga.

The same trend is noticeable in the scientific realm: research here is for its own sake far more than for the partial and fragmentary results it achieves; here we see an ever more rapid succession of unfounded theories and hypotheses, no sooner set up than crumbling to give way to others which will have an even shorter life—a veritable chaos amid which one would search in vain for anything definitive, unless it be a monstrous accumulation of facts and details incapable of proving or signifying anything [emphasis my own]

Is there no better description of LLMs? They are nothing more than an incredibly fast Google search which uses million-dollar microchips to process information put into it by programmers who fancy themselves as creating artificial life. The cooling systems required to cool these microchips add gigawatts of electrical load to outdated grids, which then poisons the water, destroys the earth, and makes toxic the air we breathe. These companies like Anthropic and OpenAI claim to be bettering humanity and bringing us towards new frontiers of knowledge, yet as Guenon teaches us: in the final stages of the Kali Yuga the kingdom of the antichrist will be set up and will clothe itself in the garbs of knowledge and righteousness, but it will really represent anti-knowledge, anti-tradition, and anti-righteousness. It will come as death, a cloud of gas emanating from a hyperscale data center. To quote a poem I once wrote about these data centers:

The air smells like gas, I break through it, fluid silver, necromancy has taken its toll…

So, as Muslims we must find our humanity, we must listen to the message of the Quran, the messages of the Prophet Muhammad (saws), the messages of Imam Al Ali (as), we must tell the truth like Sayyeda Zainab (as). We must heed the lesson of our Muslim brother, Rene Guenon, who spoke so bravely against these profane sciences 100 years ago:

It is therefore to be expected that these discoveries, or rather mechanical and industrial inventions, will go on developing and multiplying more and more rapidly until the end of the present age; and who knows if, given the dangers of destruction they bear in themselves, they will not be one of the chief agents in the ultimate catastrophe, if things reach a point which cannot be averted?

Let us reflect, let us put a stop to these monsters and their monstrosities. Let us not be seduced by the innovations of a profane technological invention which claims to be intelligent. Only Allah gives true knowledge, as he told us in Ayatul Kursi. Our earth, our water, our air depend on us.