The Scourge of Photography

السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته We have to be incredibly careful not to fall into the trap of endless debating. It is so easy to find yourself active in a gazillion groups (WhatsApp, Telegram, and social media) completely convinced that spending hours typing back and forth is daʿwah or defending the Sunnah. But we need to check our intentions, because this is a very subtle delusion. It is the trap of trading high-value deeds, like actually memorizing the Qur’ān, pursuing structured knowledge, or rectifying your own character, for a mere illusion of productivity. It feels virtuous to win an argument online, but if it doesn't bring you closer to Allāh or build real knowledge, it produces absolutely zero fruit, and might even produce thorns tearing your deeds away. If you look at the people of actual knowledge, the scholars we claim to follow, they do not behave like this at all. At all . You will not find them camping out in comment sections or debate threads. In fact, they frequentl...

السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته My advice to myself and to my brothers who are convinced of the impermissibility of taṣwīr is simple: let go and move on from this issue. You seek knowledge to benefit yourself, those around you, and those who ask you. You yourself have benefited, al-ḥamdu lillāh. But those around you? Maybe not. Should you exhaust yourself responding to every single doubt they throw at you? Absolutely not. It is from lack of ḥikmah (wisdom) to not realize the type of people you are dealing with; there are two completely different categories of people: * The Common Folk : These are the people drowning in a world where modern photography is normalized. For them, accepting that taṣwīr of animate beings is ḥarām is incredibly heavy. With them, you hold the "cord of Muʿāwiyah"—you go soft, you show deep empathy, and you remain gentle to keep them connected to the truth. * The Bad-Faith Polemicists : These are the ones actively digging in the mud and fishing in murk...

Working with UI design teaches you what most people never notice: Images are not objects, they're just colors arranged with intent. Nothing more, Nothing less. When you design interfaces, you spend a lot of time with color. You learn that a slight shift in hue changes what feels near and what feels distant. You learn that shadows are not captured — they are simulated, constructed from contrast. You learn that depth is a trick: two flat values of color, placed adjacently, make the eye perceive dimension that isn't there. Form emerges from color boundaries. Not the other way around. You learn this the way a carpenter learns wood. Through handling it. Through getting it wrong. Through seeing what actually happens when you change a value by ten units in one direction. Once you see that clearly, photography stops looking like "capturing reality"(1). It starts looking like what it actually is: constructing a color record of a moment(2). What comes out the other end of the c...

Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 5954 ) ʿAlī bnu ʿAbdillāh narrated to us; Sufyān narrated to us; he said: I heard ʿAbdurraḥmān bnu al-Qāsim—there was no one in Madīnah at that time better than him—say: I heard my father say: I heard ʿĀʾishah, may Allāh be pleased with her, say: The Messenger of Allāh, ṣallallāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam, returned from a journey, and I had covered a niche of mine with a thin curtain that had figures on it. When the Messenger of Allāh, ṣallallāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam, saw it, he tore it and said: "The most severely punished on the Day of Resurrection are those who imitate the [act of] creation of Allāh". She said: So we turned it into a cushion, or two. The point of evidence: her statement: "he tore it" So, my brothers in Īmān—those who take the Messenger of Allāh, ṣallallāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam, as their example—those who wipe only the face and leave the head; those who treat images gently, softly, leniently; those who do not feel the reprehensibility of thos...

Note: The following might be too technical to some, so if you don't understand it, that's okay, you don't have to. It's a way of making people realize how technology is just an advanced method of accomplishing the same tasks we've always known. The Digital Camera Is an Eye, a Brain, a Hand, Paint, and Canvas How so? • The eye : The camera lens is designed similar to the lens of the human eye, which regulates the amount and angle of incoming light. Just as a painter using a brush must open his eyes, a camera must as well allow light to enter through its lens. Then: The retina of the eye converts light into electrical neural signals, which are then transmitted to the brain. Likewise, the light sensors in a camera convert light into electrical signals that are transmitted to its internal computer—its “brain”. • The brain : The brain processes these data and enables us to perceive and comprehend what the eye has captured. There is no copied image; rather, we merely appr...

The Position of Ibn ʿUthaymīn on Image-Making By the shaykh: ʿAbdurraḥmān bnu Nāṣir al-Barrāk. 18/7/1428 AH   Source: (الدرر السنية) website. Translated and prepared by: ʿAbdurraḥmān bnu Mīhūb al-Qaddārī   Introduction Abū Idrīs al-Khawlānī, رحمه الله, said: Muʿādh ibn Jabal, رضي الله عنه, said: “Ahead of you are trials in which wealth will become abundant, and the Qurʾān will be widely circulated, until it is taken up by the believer and the hypocrite, the man and the woman, the young and the old, the slave and the free. Then a person will soon say: ‘What is wrong with the people that they do not follow me, when I have recited the Qurʾān? They will not follow me until I introduce something new for them.’ So beware of newly invented matters, for whatever is invented is misguidance. And I warn you against the deviation (i.e slip) of the scholar, for indeed Shayṭān may utter a word of misguidance upon the tongue of a scholar, and a hypocrite may utter a word of truth.” He said: ...

If your screen and camera cooperate to display an animate object, you're committing photography of animate beings. Even if temporary (i.e a few seconds). The claim that "no saving occurs therefore it is not ḥarām" is invalid, because it is the same as someone drawing an animate object using a brush and paint then destroying the painting...temporary! The problem is with mere existence, no matter how short the period is.