research

Digital platforms increasingly mediate how people meet, interact, and belong. Yet, most are optimized for engagement rather than relational well-being. This presentation reframes loneliness as partly a design problem, asking how interface choices, algorithms, and metrics shape social life, and what "connection-centered" technology for the public good could look like instead.

This lecture seeks to offer a philosophical introduction to understanding patterns of belief within the tradition of the Islamic world, encompassing its diverse schools and religions. It highlights the intellectual and spiritual importance of studying the doctrinal landscape. The lecture surveys major theological classifications through a range of frameworks, aiming to develop a methodological perspective that enables a reading of the theological tradition beyond reductionism and superficial categorization. It concludes with a synthetic summary that underscores the potential of this approach for understanding the philosophy of religion in the tradition of the Islamic world.

This study provides a comprehensive overview on the concepts of freedom of opinion and expression and their position within the legislative and regulatory frameworks of Saudi Arabia, tracing their historical development from a legal perspective. It begins with the Sharia-based and statutory foundations, proceeds to analyze the relevant laws and regulations, most notably the Audiovisual Media Law, alongside the Anti-Cybercrime Law and the Press and Publications Law, and culminates in a review of recent judicial applications and legal interpretations in light of rapid social and technological transformations. The research further draws on selected examples as practical illustrations of how freedom of opinion and expression is exercised and regulated in practice. Finally, it offers a comprehensive analytical summary that includes findings and legal recommendations aimed at advancing regulatory understanding and encouraging future scholarly inquiry in this sensitive and critical field.

Recent scholarship has increasingly questioned inherited taxonomies for classifying intellectual traditions associated with Islamicate societies. One particularly influential intervention is Peter Adamson’s coinage of the phrase “Philosophy in the Islamic World”. This formulation that has shaped major research projects, teaching curricula, and public-facing scholarship. Rather than presenting the term as a direct substitute for premodern classificatory schemes, this paper situates it alongside the long-standing designation of the so-called “rational sciences” (al-ʿulūm al-ʿaqliyya) in order to examine how different modes of naming delineate the scope of inquiry. The paper opens by laying out the conceptual problem of naming this field of research and briefly introducing the category al-ʿulūm al-ʿaqliyya as a historically operative umbrella for a range of disciplines. It then turns to Adamson’s formulation to reconstruct the intellectual motivations behind its coinage and the kinds of figures, texts, and traditions it is intended to bring into view. The subsequent section raises a set of critical questions about the phrase “Philosophy in the Islamic World”. Does it risk reifying geographic or cultural containers even as it seeks to avoid them? How does it negotiate the relationship between philosophical practice, religious identity, and institutional context? What kinds of inclusions or exclusions does it generate? Particularly with regard to theology (Kalām), mysticism/sufism, and scientific disciplines? In response, the paper proposes an alternative terminological framework designed to better capture the plurality and methodological diversity of these traditions without reinscribing civilizational boundaries or modern disciplinary projections. It concludes by reflecting on the broader scholarly significance of acts of naming: how terminological choices shape academic projects, pedagogical approaches, and the self-conception of individual researchers, and how a recalibrated vocabulary might open new horizons for comparative philosophy and global intellectual history.

Political closure has repeatedly altered the texture of everyday life across the Middle East. In such moments, public activism often recedes, while new practices of coping, critique, and self-management move to the foreground. This paper contends that these shifts should not be read simply as apathy. Instead, it conceptualizes disengagement as a historically recurring psychological and social strategy through which individuals recalibrate agency in contexts marked by fear, repression, and ideological exhaustion. Medieval ethical traditions—most notably Sufi disciplines of retreat, emotional cultivation, and moral self-work—serve as a comparative baseline for examining contemporary responses to political contraction before and after the Arab Spring. The analysis draws on a broad archive that pairs Sufi manuals and hagiography with twenty-first-century satire, memoirs, advice literature, and digital media. Across these corpora, three patterns recur: techniques of ethical self-regulation, indirect political commentary through humor and irony, and the reorientation of aspiration toward private futures shaped by marriage, migration, and career planning. In both eras, such practices mediated relationships to authority and risk, offering ways to manage disappointment, uncertainty, and vulnerability when overt political participation carried high costs. Placing post-2011 therapeutic idioms, meme cultures, and privatized life projects in dialogue with medieval repertoires of spiritual discipline unsettles narratives that treat contemporary disengagement as uniquely modern or merely neoliberal. What emerges instead is a longer genealogy of political subjectivity in which Middle Eastern actors repeatedly reworked the boundaries of public action through everyday practices of endurance, discretion, and emotional recalibration when collective horizons narrowed.

Across much of the Arab world and its diasporas, remote work has shifted from a lifestyle choice to a strategy of economic survival and social mobility. Freelancing, platform-based contracting, e-commerce, and digital consulting now allow individuals to navigate unemployment, currency instability, political uncertainty, restrictive labor markets, and mobility constraints. This paper examines how Arabs working online within the region and abroad experience remote labor as a multidimensional condition shaped by economic necessity, social expectations, infrastructural limits, and geopolitical borders. Drawing on interviews with remote workers, analysis of social-media content, and close reading of platform policies and various initiatives, the paper traces how workers describe opportunity alongside vulnerability. It shows how reputational systems and algorithmic visibility govern livelihoods, and how family obligations, gender norms, and migration aspiration structure participation in digital labor markets. Attention is paid to the cultural practices through which workers narrate independence, risk, dignity, and long-term security and/or lack thereof. The paper argues that remote work has become a key site where regional challenges such as unemployment, state reforms, informal economies, and transnational inequality are negotiated in everyday life. Rather than framing digital labor as either emancipation or exploitation, the analysis highlights how individuals, institutions, and governments are experimenting with regulatory frameworks, platform localization, and new forms of cross-border entrepreneurship. By foregrounding the lived realities of Arab remote workers, the paper contributes to debates on the future of work, digital capitalism, and regional adaptation, and offers a grounded account of how online labor is reshaping economic futures in and beyond the Arab world.

Argues that current AI systems embody epistemic injustice by being built from a narrow techno-professional standpoint, and that epistemic pluralism is both an ethical demand and a conceptual requirement for achieving genuine AGI/ASI. Introduces "The Epistemically Plural AI Framework (EPAIF)," and authentic practical framework for applying pluralism in AI infrastructure and development

A philosophical essay arguing that the gap between information generattion and processing is structural and permanent, not a limit technology will eventually overcome. Drawing on information theory, Islamic philosophy, Aristotle, Zen Buddhism, and the metaphysical ramifications of embodiment in time and space, it makes the case that no system can ever know everything, and that the real task is learning to act well under permanent incompleteness rather than waiting to know enough.

Explores the philosophical question of why are we encouraged to share our ideas despite some legitimate reasons for staying silent. It presents several justifications: the uniqueness of personal experience and how it can be enriched through dialogue with others, the reciprocal relationship between ideas and reality, the role of dialogue in pursuing truth and self-development, and the human need for community. The piece also connects the concepts of speech and humanity, drawing on the classical definition of humans as "rational/speaking animals," concluding that sharing ideas is an essential part of human identity itself.