Allahu Akbar: When the Beautiful, the Ethical, and the Imaginative Meet in Muslim Futures

This paper explores and situates the manifestation of Muslim futures, a socio-ethical and aesthetic movement encompassing young Muslims creating artworks in which they engage a wide range of moral dilemmas ranging from systemic oppression (in both Islamic and non-Islamic countries), unequal wealth distribution, to the consequences of climate change. Taking a 2024 Muslim futures exhibition in Berlin, Germany, as point of entry into inquiry, reflection, and analysis, this article argues that within the praxis and intellectual paradigms of imagining and articulating Muslim dystopias and utopias, the entities of imagination (khayal), ethics(akhlaq), and beauty (jamal) are intrinsically linked. These Islamic concepts are paramount in an understanding of how the Islamically meaningful influences these endeavors. Accordingly, as these artists take their relationship with the divine as a starting point for their projects, this paper also aims to contribute to understandings of Muslim subjectivity by "taking" their postulated connections with the Unknown (al Ghayb, the Islamic spiritual locus of God, angels, demons, and the future) "seriously" (Moll, 2023). It does so by exercising the latest decolonial calls to go “beyond the human horizon” in social sciences (Mittermaier,2021), placing the spiritual undertones of the project at the center of consideration. Essentially, this paper thus asks: what does a socio-political imagination of the future look like from a Muslim positionality, in which one's relationship with the divine forms the basis of imaginatory processes? And most importantly, how does one capture these processes? In attempting to work through these questions, this paper ultimately also calls for a complexification of epistemological considerations, including the importance of interdisciplinary approaches. Inclusivity of a plethora of positionalities and epistemologies are paramount to account for the political undertones that come with the realm of "futuring" as they reveal dynamics that underpin the power-struggles of these endeavours.