Al Salam Alaikum 🌱 

✏️ Note: Once again, these are reflections I’m sharing from what I am noticing as someone who lives inside the same business culture I’m trying to think about- and connecting it to my research on coloniality and the kinds of belonging it has tried to replace.

I want to start with the language, because I think the language is where the trouble begins.

Listen to how we describe each other now: “connections,” “leads,” “warm intros,” “network,” “circle,” “tribe,” “audience,” and “community.”

We “leverage” each other.

We “build” pipelines.

We have “ICP”- ideal customer profiles- for the people in our community.

We “nurture” them, the way a farmer nurtures something he intends to harvest.

I am not above this. I have used every one of these words myself. I am writing in a medium that runs on them. I’m aware of this.

But I have started to notice that none of these words sound like the Quran.

None of them sound like the Prophetic Sunnah.

None of them sound like the way my grandmother described her neighbors.

So I want to share what I’ve been thinking-as a quiet alarm- if you will.

🌐 Where “Networking” Came From

I had to look this up to be sure. The word “networking” in its current professional sense is recent.

It belongs to mid-20th-century American corporate culture- Dale Carnegie, the Rotary Club, the rise of the business luncheon.

It was formalized in the 1970s and 1980s as a strategy for individuals to advance through informal exchange of favors.

That is its origin. A tactic for individual advancement inside a competitive economic system.

I want to be fair: there is nothing necessarily wrong with people helping each other through introductions. What I’m pointing at is something deeper than the practice. It’s the logic.

The networking logic says: relationships are instruments. Their value is measured by what they can do for me. The good ones produce returns; the unproductive ones are quietly let go.

The network is a tool of the self.

That is a specific worldview. It is not a universal one. And I don’t think it is ours.

🫀 What the Ummah Actually Is

The Ummah is not a network. The Ummah is a covenant.

A network is held together by mutual usefulness.

A covenant is held together by shared obligation before Allah (SWT).

You don’t drop someone from a covenant because they stop being profitable to you. You don’t “leverage” people you’ve taken a binding promise toward.

The Prophet (peace be upon him) described the believers as a single body- when one limb hurts, the whole body has fever.

That is not networking language. That is bodily, painful, unchosen, irreducible belonging.

Ibn Khaldun wrote about asabiyyah- that thick, almost stubborn social cohesion that holds a community together through generations.

Modern networks are designed to be the opposite: lightweight, opt-in, easy to leave. Frictionless. Disposable.

I think we have been quietly trading asabiyyah for modern networking.

🎭️ The Coloniality of It

Here is where my reading on coloniality keeps tugging at me.

Anibal Quijano (yes, him again!) described coloniality as the way colonial logic outlive formal colonization- they keep organizing how we know, work, and relate, even after the flags has been lowered.

What I am noticing is that the networking logic feels like common sense now. It feels obvious. It feels like just how business works.

And that is exactly the shape coloniality takes when it has finished its work- invisible, assumed, unquestioned.

The communities our grandparents lived in did not function like LinkedIn- at all! They functioned through qard hasan- beautiful loans without interest, given without contracts.

Through mushawara- collective consultation, where decisions belonged to more than one head.

Through obligations of silat al-rahim- keeping ties of kinship that you did not choose and could not optimize anyway.

These are not quaint traditions. These are wise and sophisticated, time-tested social technologies for building communities that don’t need a transaction to justify a relationship.

And we have been steadily replacing them with software, sadly.

🩹 What Mutual Aid Actually Looks Like

Outside our tradition, people are starting to remember this.

Dean Spade, writing on mutual aid, points out that what radical communities are now rediscovering as “mutual aid” was, for most of human history, simply how communities worked- before the market and the state convinced us that need was a transaction and care was a service.

Ivan Illich, decades earlier, wrote about conviviality- the kind of human relationship that doesn’t need a professional class to mediate it. Friendship without a CRM. Neighborliness without a referral fee. He envisioned a society of responsibility limited tools that empower individuals for creative, autonomous action rather than reducing people to passive consumers managed by massive institutional systems.

Illich’s concept remains highly relevant, serving as a foundational philosophy for modern tech-critical movements, open-source communities, and localized “degrowth” initiatives.

I read this work and I think: can this be the masjid for Muslims? Can this be the collective prayer? I’d go so far as to argue that this is what the Ummah has always been when it has been allowed to be itself.

Faith-first entrepreneurs talk a lot about “serving the Ummah.” But I wonder, sometimes, whether what we mean by Ummah has quietly shrunk to mean audience. Whether we are building businesses that serve a community, or businesses that mine one.

I include myself in the question. I do not exclude myself from it.

❌ The Quiet Violence of “Audience”

Think about the word for a moment. Audience.

An audience is a one-way relationship.

They watch; you perform.

They consume; you produce.

The relationship is mediated, scaled, measured in numbers, and ended whenever either party stops finding it useful.

That is not what ahl-al-Sunnah meany by jama’ah.

That is not what the Muhajirun meant when they shared their wealth with the Ansar.

That is not what the Prophet (peace be upon him) meant when he said the believer is a mirror to his brother.

But “audience” is a word the platform gave us, and we picked it up without asking what it was replacing.

We need to think twice about what we are building and who we are building for.

And more importantly, remember that the Ummah is NOT a network. The Ummah is a covenant.

My invitation is for you to spend one hour this week with someone in your community whether there is no possible business outcome. No pitch. No content. No introduction you might benefit from. No information you’re harvesting. 

Maybe it’s an elder at the masjid or a young sibling or cousin who is struggling and has nothing (material) to give you back.

If you cannot think of anyone like that- if every relationship in your life has a possible “use”- that is the data. Don’t ignore it.

💌 I’d Love to Hear From You!

If this reflection sparked something in you, I’d love to hear it. You can reply directly to this email- I read and respond to every message 🌱 

🤲 Closing Dua

“O Allah, unite our hearts, set right our affairs, and guide us to the paths to peace.”

Ameen