Social Media and Faith

Everyone knows what the word “selfie” means nowadays, including my grandma and my 7-year-old sister. It’s a picture, usually taken with your cell phone and it can capture your good days, your bad days, and any experience in-between. Looking back, it can also be a way to reflect on how you’ve changed over the years or the places you’ve been to and the sites you’ve seen. It can be a memory you can revisit over and over again whenever you want to reminisce. It’s your personal expression of how you connected with the world.

It sounds harmless and even pretty awesome, right? But what happens when you take this image out of your camera roll and place it into the land of social media? Does its value change? Does your perception of the experience change? Does it affect your future experiences and how you choose to portray them? You’ll notice that no one can answer these questions except yourself. As much as social media emphasizes connection and communication, it can boil down to an internal dialogue we have with ourselves.

You’re probably wondering how we went from a simple idea of a selfie to a complex psychological concept. With the advent of technology and social media, this “Selfie Phenomenon” and the idea of documenting our lives has a marked influence on us, whether we acknowledge it or not. It can begin to affect how we perceive ourselves, how we perceive others, and the motive behind our actions may even begin to change. This is why it is important to understand how we can interact with social media in a manner that is progressive to our lives and not detrimental to our mental health or our faith.

Within the growth of the “Selfie Phenomenon” and the idea of documenting our lives comes a significant consequence of losing touch with an experience itself. As Brother Omar Usman, one of the founding members of Qalam Institute said,

“Social media has enabled a competition of experience.”

It’s no longer the intimate personalized connections we make that give value to our experiences, but rather our ability to display “how much we have done” or “where we have gone”. It’s no longer an experience where we are 100% present, but rather a sort of documentation for someone besides our own self to enjoy. It’s as if we have removed ourselves from the picture, literally. I can say that I have been guilty of this myself—peering through my camera phone, recording the moments, only to return home realizing my camera stood between me and the experience, me and the moment, me and reality. The benefits of technology and social media can be endless, but they can also be detrimental when they take away from what makes us human as they rob us of the sentiments that come from the emotion of an actual experience.

A benefit to the advance of social media is a remarkable opportunity to show the transcendent nature of Islam. The versatility that the religion has, its ability to address all parts of our lives even to this day, and its ability to guide us throughout each experience is truly remarkable. To show us how each of these principles are lived in everyday life, we have the most excellent of all teachers, Prophet Mohammad, Peace be Upon Him. Looking to the Sunnah can give us not only a code for life, but also a guaranteed sense of peace and ease in our hearts. The Prophetic traditions of our Messenger (pbuh) are timeless and can be applied even to our age of social media.

In an effort to provide relevant solutions to the problems we face and also address all types of issues in detail regarding social media and its influence on our faith, a project has been initiated by Brother Omar Usman in coordination with Sheikh AbdulNasir Jangda and Mufti Hussain Kamani and others. One of the first initiatives from this project was publishing an e-book with 40 Hadiths on Social Media. You can check out the project and also access the e-book through the site: http://fiqhofsocial.media. I would like to highlight one of the Hadiths that was discussed within the book: Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) said,

“Actions are judged by intentions, so each man will have what he intended. Therefore, he whose migration was to Allah and His messenger, his migration is to Allah and His Messenger. But he whose migration was for some worldly benefit, or for a wife he might marry, his migration is to that for which he migrated.” (Bukhari and Muslim)

Intention is at the core of everything that we do. Often times we think that it is done simply before an action that we do, but it is something that must be checked before, during, and even after the deed is done. We must ask ourselves and assess the reason behind why we post something, how we post something, and what meaning we are trying to convey. Who are we posting this for, what are we trying to achieve? Where are we migrating? Is it towards Allah or towards a worldly benefit?

As you see, these again are things we can only answer within ourselves. Within this process of assessing what and how we post things, I see a hidden blessing. The fruits of this blessing can be attained when we realize that every action we do, even posting on social media, can be a means of getting closer to Allah, a means of purifying ourselves, and a means of attaining reward we might not even imagine possible. When we attach our motivation to the pleasure of Allah (swt), even social media can be means of improving our connection with the One who made everything that we do possible. In this we realize that everything we do must be active and not passive. Our intentions must be checked often and our motives must be assessed constantly. We are kept alive in this way, we are connected to the present in this way, and we realize our purpose in this way.

When we are constantly connected to Allah (swt), our connections online will even serve as ways to potentially strengthen this One true connection. Whether it’s before we engage in an activity or after and what we post or what we discuss, when we follow the morals and values of our Prophet (pbuh), our path will be illuminated with rewards and opportunities we never could have imagined. Instead of letting social media desensitize us from our experiences, let it keep us alive by way of our intentions. Let them be a sense of connection, not merely with the world, but with the One Who created it.

I myself am striving to implement these things within my use of social media, and I write this hoping to keep my own self accountable with how I use it. I pray that Allāh helps us keep our intentions for Him and brings us back to the correct way and forgives us if we fall short to anything other than this. I pray that we use the things we are blessed with to connect to Allah (swt), ameen.