And, no, this isn't an April Fool's Day joke, although there are some aspects of today's post which seem unbelievable. As I've stated, there's no internal logic to this year-long journey, and I'm going to talk about what I feel like talking about on that day. Since I often write these days if not weeks in advance it also means that often I come back and change the order of things, with posts getting bumped back if something pops up that seems more pressing or interesting. Often I'll be focusing on something from the Quran or the Hadith, but at other times I'll be talking about something going on in my life or something I read in the media or something that popped up on Twitter (where I spend much too much time). In this case I'm going to talk about some technology.
This year in my two classes dealing with Islam, my Dar al-Islam: India and my Dar al-Islam: Yemen courses, I asked the students to download the Muslim Pro app onto their smart phones. In the past I've emailed all the students in the class five times a day, essentially when it was time to pray if you were a Muslim, and I'd share a little information about that particular prayer or just generally about Islam or being a Muslim. My only direction was: for the love of God, this is not an order to pray, so don't pray. Rather, I just wanted them to think about a life wherein faith, no matter the faith, was that close to them on a daily basis. As Americans we tend to, grudgingly, give our faith about an hour over the weekend (as long as things aren't too crowded on the schedule), so the students have traditionally had an interesting response to the exercise. Sometimes they found it oddly comforting, and other times they found it rather claustrophobic.
This year I ratcheted up the experiment by having them download the Muslim Pro app, which advertises itself as the "Most Popular Muslim app in the world", and Muslim prayer apps are (or at least are supposed to be) the most popular apps in the world. Now, if any students had objected I would have quite willingly amended the assignment for them, and I also told them that at the end of the week they should just go ahead and delete the app from their phones. My students, being pretty uniformly decent souls, all agreed to download the app. This time I had two directions: 1) once again, for the love of God do not pray, and 2) think about the interaction between faith and technology. My students, as most young folks today, are remarkably hyper-connected, so I was interested in their reflections on the lines between technology and faith.
They actually seemed to enjoy the experience, and several of them actually didn't delete the app because they found it interesting. I told them how to disable the sound on the prayer notification, so that instead of the call to prayer blaring out of your phone's speakers you just get a little icon. My student John, noted for his good nature and general lunacy, left the sound notification on (or at least that's his version of the story). Some of their big takeaways: 1) they, naturally enough, found the ads disconcerting; when you log on to the site you always get a one screen ad (although happily no sound), which might be something for a Vermont tire company but it might also be an ad for whiskey - especially disconcerting to a devout Muslim; these are not a problem on the deluxe pay version of the app; 2) they liked the Qibla feature which tells you which way to face during prayer, although they found the logic of why it directs you to Mecca by way of London puzzling; 3) they thought the Mosques feature, which directs you to local mosques, including a map and directions, to be useful, although we only have one mosque in the state; 4) they found the Halal Places features, designed to tell you where to find halal restaurants, although they were deeply suspicious that Unos or Five Guys was actually halal - which in turn led to an interesting discussion on what's constitutes halal, and who makes that judgment - and how one got on the list - and, again naturally enough, my Marketing students found all of this fascinating; 5) they liked the Duas feature, although they noted the, in their minds, profound difference between folks asking for prayers for serious reasons and those asking for prayers for borderline frivolous reasons - while also thinking about similar difference in other religions; 6) they liked the fact they could use the app to send each other e-cards (clearly I need to give them more homework), and 7) they found the little feature that allows you to flip prayer beads to be well-intentioned but also very distracting.
So, all in all, I think it was a useful experiment and one I'll repeat in the future. I don't really talk about my own personal faith in class, and especially how the app's Personal Tracker feature is a constant reminder of routinely I fail at everything (which I suppose is the point). That said, one of my goals in this process is to be more structured in my faith, so I guess the app,with all of its failings, is probably helping in the process.
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| I shamelessly swiped this app from the Internet, but somehow I don't think the folks at Muslim Pro will care. This is what the basic (that is: free) version looks like on an android phone, although I suspect it would look different if you paid for the deluxe version (no commercials, more on that below) or IPhone versions. |
This year in my two classes dealing with Islam, my Dar al-Islam: India and my Dar al-Islam: Yemen courses, I asked the students to download the Muslim Pro app onto their smart phones. In the past I've emailed all the students in the class five times a day, essentially when it was time to pray if you were a Muslim, and I'd share a little information about that particular prayer or just generally about Islam or being a Muslim. My only direction was: for the love of God, this is not an order to pray, so don't pray. Rather, I just wanted them to think about a life wherein faith, no matter the faith, was that close to them on a daily basis. As Americans we tend to, grudgingly, give our faith about an hour over the weekend (as long as things aren't too crowded on the schedule), so the students have traditionally had an interesting response to the exercise. Sometimes they found it oddly comforting, and other times they found it rather claustrophobic.
This year I ratcheted up the experiment by having them download the Muslim Pro app, which advertises itself as the "Most Popular Muslim app in the world", and Muslim prayer apps are (or at least are supposed to be) the most popular apps in the world. Now, if any students had objected I would have quite willingly amended the assignment for them, and I also told them that at the end of the week they should just go ahead and delete the app from their phones. My students, being pretty uniformly decent souls, all agreed to download the app. This time I had two directions: 1) once again, for the love of God do not pray, and 2) think about the interaction between faith and technology. My students, as most young folks today, are remarkably hyper-connected, so I was interested in their reflections on the lines between technology and faith.
They actually seemed to enjoy the experience, and several of them actually didn't delete the app because they found it interesting. I told them how to disable the sound on the prayer notification, so that instead of the call to prayer blaring out of your phone's speakers you just get a little icon. My student John, noted for his good nature and general lunacy, left the sound notification on (or at least that's his version of the story). Some of their big takeaways: 1) they, naturally enough, found the ads disconcerting; when you log on to the site you always get a one screen ad (although happily no sound), which might be something for a Vermont tire company but it might also be an ad for whiskey - especially disconcerting to a devout Muslim; these are not a problem on the deluxe pay version of the app; 2) they liked the Qibla feature which tells you which way to face during prayer, although they found the logic of why it directs you to Mecca by way of London puzzling; 3) they thought the Mosques feature, which directs you to local mosques, including a map and directions, to be useful, although we only have one mosque in the state; 4) they found the Halal Places features, designed to tell you where to find halal restaurants, although they were deeply suspicious that Unos or Five Guys was actually halal - which in turn led to an interesting discussion on what's constitutes halal, and who makes that judgment - and how one got on the list - and, again naturally enough, my Marketing students found all of this fascinating; 5) they liked the Duas feature, although they noted the, in their minds, profound difference between folks asking for prayers for serious reasons and those asking for prayers for borderline frivolous reasons - while also thinking about similar difference in other religions; 6) they liked the fact they could use the app to send each other e-cards (clearly I need to give them more homework), and 7) they found the little feature that allows you to flip prayer beads to be well-intentioned but also very distracting.
So, all in all, I think it was a useful experiment and one I'll repeat in the future. I don't really talk about my own personal faith in class, and especially how the app's Personal Tracker feature is a constant reminder of routinely I fail at everything (which I suppose is the point). That said, one of my goals in this process is to be more structured in my faith, so I guess the app,with all of its failings, is probably helping in the process.
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