Sexually explicit deepfakes are everywhere in high schools.

Matteo Wong from the Atlantic about the power of AI:

This power has brought with it a tremendous dark side that many experts are only now beginning to contend with: AI is being used to create nonconsensual, sexually explicit images and videos of children. And not just in a handful of cases—perhaps millions of kids nationwide have been affected in some way by the emergence of this technology, either directly victimized themselves or made aware of other students who have been.

Kids as young as 9 are being exposed to this type of material:

Today’s report joins several others documenting the alarming prevalence of AI-generated NCII. In August, Thorn, a nonprofit that monitors and combats the spread of child-sexual-abuse material (CSAM), released a report finding that 11 percent of American children ages 9 to 17 know of a peer who has used AI to generate nude images of other kids.

The amount of AI-generated CSAM is also underreported:

Although the number of official reports related to AI-generated CSAM are relatively small—roughly 5,000 tips in 2023 to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, compared with tens of millions of reports about other abusive images involving children that same year—those figures were possibly underestimated and have been growing. It’s now likely that “there are thousands of new [CSAM] images being generated a day,” David Thiel, who studies AI-generated CSAM at Stanford, told me. This summer, the U.K.-based Internet Watch Foundation found that in a one-month span in the spring, more than 3,500 examples of AI-generated CSAM were uploaded to a single dark-web forum—an increase from the 2,978 uploaded during the previous September.

Most of these victims naturally are female, which should not be a surprise.

Share this with Muslim parents (heck, all parents), who still think public schools are safe and OK, especially for their daughters.

Instagram tries to do damage control..

Alaina Demopoulos from The Guardian:

Sevey Morton first got an Instagram account when she was 10 years old. She used it to keep up with friends, but also to follow pop culture trends. Now 16, the San Diego high schooler says all the airbrushed perfection and slickly edited selfies from celebrities and influencers made her hyper-focused on her appearance, causing anxiety and body image issues.

“Being exposed to that at a very young age impacted the way I grew into myself,” Morton said. “There is a huge part of me that wishes social media did not exist.”

In the book, “Beauty sick,” practically every single girl that was interviewed was thankful that social media didn’t exist back in the 80s and 90s.

The sad thing is that if we don’t guide our kids, then they will always think about what others think about them, versus what Allah thinks about them. If our girls from an early age focus on Allah, then life will be easier for both them and their families! We sometimes think Islam makes our lives harder, but the reality is that it makes it simpler, easier, and more peaceful.

Does instagram have a solution? Sure it does, but they could have acted a lot sooner:

Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, an organization that promotes safe technology for children, called the timing of Meta’s announcement “transparent.

“This is basically another attempt to make a splashy announcement when the company’s feeling the heat politically, period” Steyer said. “Meta has always had these capabilities and the ability to develop new features, and they could have done this to protect young people for the last 10 years. Now that we’re in the middle of a mental health crisis among young people that’s been significantly brought on by social media platforms like Instagram, they’re acting now under pressure from lawmakers and advocates.”

Even if the social media companies are acting to protect the youth under pressure, these stop gaps are not good enough according to experts:

For Jon-Patrick Allem, an associate professor at Rutgers School of Public Health who researches social media’s effects on teens, Instagram’s new rules do not seem radical. “I read a line in the New York Times that described these rules as ‘a sweeping overhaul’,” he said. “I can’t think of a worse way of describing this. I think instead, these are slight modifications on one app that will probably do some good, but not enough good.”

So basically, Instagram is like Morphine, and Instagram with the new teen restrictions is like Suboxone. You’ll still be hooked, but you can’t get as high as you used to.

You will fail to achieve ultimate happiness, and that failure should make you happy.

I remember driving to college back in the early 2000s, and I was just hoping to already be in the future.

I didn’t want to go through the struggles of going through college, another 4 years or more of tests, papers, etc. 

I just wanted to start working and get married. 

Kids weren’t really in my radar, but just to have a companion to spend time with and do things couples do would just be really nice. 

I just wanted to be established right now!

I wanted to be like those who were older than me, who were already established in their careers, married, and had families.

Alhamdulillah that time has come. Now in my early 40s, I have a good job, a loving wife and kids, and I have achieved what I wanted over 20 years ago. 

The crazy thing is, sometimes when I go to work, or when I’m just thinking about life while driving, I wish I could go back to the times when things were easy. I was living single, and life was just more calm and less hectic. 

Hanging out with friends in college was a blast!

There were less responsibilities, less people relying on me (after Allah of course), and probably less stress (or just different kinds of stress).

There was less lewdness in society, less liberalism, less deviance, and NO social media.

Subhan Allah, I got what I wanted, but now I want to go back to the “good ol’ days.”

This isn’t to say that I am not extremely thankful, but it just shows us what humans are like. 

We will never achieve ultimate happiness in this world.

We will never achieve ultimate satisfaction in this world.

Stress will always be there, but it will manifest itself in different ways.

It’s either school and getting those grades, or it’s family and thinking about how will I find the right spouse for my daughters?

This cycle of life, where we are never really in a state of bliss, is just a reminder that this life was never meant to be blissful.

That is why it is called a delusion in the Qur’an:

 وَمَا ٱلْحَيَوٰةُ ٱلدُّنْيَآ إِلَّا مَتَـٰعُ ٱلْغُرُورِ ٢٠

The life of this world is nothing but delusion.

Surah Hadid (57:20)

You can never be truly happy in this life. Your pursuit for endless happiness will only make you realize how sad you are, because you're chasing a mirage.

Whether you are rich or poor, you will always have something to worry about. 

Your health.

Your kids.

Your family.

Your business.

Your job.

But don’t worry, because you and I were created to be in constant struggle in this life.

I know that sounds crazy, but it is true!

Most definitely, we were created to be in constant struggle:

لَقَدْ خَلَقْنَا ٱلْإِنسَـٰنَ فِى كَبَدٍ ٤

Indeed, We have created humankind in ˹constant˺ struggle.

Surah Balad (90:4)

This verse always makes me feel at ease and I believe can solve people’s depression because it makes me realize that problems and struggles will always be there.

The perfect life doesn’t exist.

That Instagram life doesn’t exist!

There will always be some things that will make you stressed, so don’t throw all your hopes and dreams on this life. 

On the flipside, remember what Allah says when He describes Jannah:

بَلَىٰ مَنْ أَسْلَمَ وَجْهَهُۥ لِلَّهِ وَهُوَ مُحْسِنٌۭ فَلَهُۥٓ أَجْرُهُۥ عِندَ رَبِّهِۦ وَلَا خَوْفٌ عَلَيْهِمْ وَلَا هُمْ يَحْزَنُونَ ١١٢

But no! Whoever submits themselves to Allah and does good will have their reward with their Lord. And there will be no fear for them, nor will they grieve.

Surah Baqara (2:112)

Did you read that last part?

“There will be no fear for them, nor will they grieve.”

This is the part of Jannah that we have not had a preview of in this world. We have had a preview of a lot of other traits of Jannah, such as rivers, good food, women, money, children, and other luxuries, but we have never really tasted the lack of fear or grief. 

There’s always something in the back of our heads that keeps us occupied regardless of who we are.

Everyone struggles, everyone goes through hardships.

But we can use these struggles to remind ourselves that the ultimate goal is to get to Jannah, and that will be the place of no fear and no grief.

If you feel like you constantly have problems in your life,

Welcome to the club!

Why Muslim men need to be fit.

I’ve heard many podcasts about this topic, and it’s nice to see one from a Muslim perspective, Allahumma barik. Check out this video, and here’s a serious but funny clip from the show 😅.

Cutting off your parents is now becoming more acceptable.

Anna Russell from The New Yorker, writes about how many people are going “no contact” with their parents. She goes through a detailed story of a girl named Amy, and it is quite chilling how this can be a reflection of the Muslim family breakdown as well: 

One day in the mid-two-thousands, a teen-ager named Amy waited to hear the voice of God. She was sitting in a youth Bible-study group, surrounded by her peers, and losing patience. Everyone else in the group seemed to hear God speak all the time, but Amy had never heard Him, not even a peep. Her hands didn’t shimmer with gold dust after she prayed, as others claimed theirs did, and she was never able to say, with confidence, “The Holy Spirit told me to do it.” She went home that evening, determined to try again the next day. A few years passed and she still heard nothing. She began to wonder if something was wrong with her. “God didn’t talk to me,” she wrote later, in a blog post. “I was afraid that meant either he wasn’t there, or I wasn’t good enough.”

Amy, the eldest of five siblings, was homeschooled by evangelical parents in the suburbs of Alberta, Canada. (She asked that I use only her first name.) She was bright, and happy, and remembers days spent reading “David Copperfield” aloud with her siblings. It was only when she left for college—Ambrose University, a Christian liberal-arts school—that aspects of her childhood began to strike her as peculiar. Amy remembers her parents telling her, when she was six, that her grandparents were going to Hell because they weren’t Christians. She grew up believing in creationism, and was startled to feel persuaded by the evidence for evolution in her college textbooks. She grappled with the “problem of evil”: If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, how can he allow so many terrible things to happen? “I started to diverge from my parents,” she told me recently.

Part of Amy’s original motivation for going to college, which she paid for herself, was to find a husband: she had been taught that men were better spiritual leaders than women, and hoped that a partner could help her hear God. Ambrose was socially conservative. No drinking. No sex outside of marriage. She found a boyfriend, but the relationship didn’t last, and soon she wasn’t sure she wanted to get married at all. She enjoyed her courses, and took such thorough notes that, on one occasion, other students offered to buy them. “Amy came to university like a sponge,” Ken Nickel, Amy’s philosophy professor, told me. “She wanted to understand.” On visits home, she stumbled into conflicts. During a family vacation in 2013, she told her parents and siblings that she didn’t think the Bible implied that it was wrong to be gay. “I think, naïvely, I was just, like, Oh, they’ve just never heard this interpretation,” she said. “And they’ll be, like, ‘Oh, my gosh, thank you for letting us know!’ ” Instead, as Amy tells it, one of her younger brothers became upset, and quoted Bible verses to make the opposite argument. Her mother sent her a letter expressing concern for her soul. During the drive home after her graduation, it came up that Amy identified as a feminist, and her parents began arguing with her about abortion. She cried in the back seat.

Amy attended law school, and a few years later returned to Ambrose to speak at an event. While visiting, she learned from the university’s president that her parents had sent him a letter expressing displeasure about Amy’s transformation. Their daughter used to be a “Bible quizzer,” they wrote, but now “rarely picks up a Bible except to highlight the verses that she believes say the opposite of their obvious and orthodox meaning.” Her mother said that Amy had a difficult relationship with her brothers, whom she now regarded as “misogynists.” If her parents could start over, they would discourage her from attending the school. “She used to be a calm and steady young woman but now suffers from a sometimes debilitating anxiety in spite of how faithful and unwavering God is in His support and provision,” the letter read. “She has turned her face from Him towards despair.” Amy told me that learning about the letter was “destabilizing.” She wasn’t yet estranged from her family—that would happen a few years later—but she found herself visiting less often.

Family estrangement—the process by which family members become strangers to one another, like intimacy reversed—is still somewhat taboo. But, in some circles, that’s changing. In recent years, advocates for the estranged have begun a concerted effort to normalize it. Getting rid of the stigma, they argue, will allow more people to get out of unhealthy family relationships without shame…

This is a concerning trend that we need to be aware of, especially Muslims. I have seen numerous sisters who were from practicing families and wore the hijab, and now have taken off the hijab and fully embraced the independent female, liberal lifestyle. 

I have also seen brothers who were from Muslim families attend college and become atheists after studying philosophy, with their parents devastated. 

I have seen parents die a little on the inside when their kids have strayed away, and I can see it on their faces. 

It’s really sad.

What we have to realize is that shaytan doesn’t start attacking people after they go away to college, but it starts from birth. We have all heard the famous hadith:

Abu Huraira reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “No person is born but that he is pricked by Satan and he cries from the touch of Satan, except for the son of Mary and his mother.” Abu Huraira said, “Recite the verse if you wish: Verily, I seek refuge for her and her offspring from the cursed Satan.” (3:36)

Source: Sahih Bukhari 3431, Sahih Muslim 2366

What happens after birth? You give your child to the daycare to raise, which has been considered criminal by even the liberal scholars like Hamza Yusuf. Then they are raised by their peers in school, then high school, then college, and then you wonder why they are totally different from you and your Islamic values. 

There is anything but Islam in these institutions, especially in college. The idea is to liberalize the people and make them pursue the mirage of self-happiness, and self-pleasure, which ironically leads to more depression.

As parents, we need to educate ourselves about the religion, and we need to also know how to defend the religion. It is not enough to just teach Islam to your families, but they need to know how to counter the constant attacks against it. The least we can do is have the resources on hand when we need to have discussions with our kids.

I have just provided you with an excerpt, but you should definitely read the full story here if the above link doesn’t work.

The Death of Parenting?

Al-Farsi from MuslimSkeptic describing the death of parenting:

From the moment they are born, they are subjected to medical procedures, poked, bled, prodded, injected, and handled by uniformed strangers who usher them into their new life. At the tender age of three or four, they are torn from the loving embrace of their mothers, their lips barely dry from the final taste of their mother’s milk, and they are thrust into the cold hands of an education system.

They are herded onto school buses and taken to uniform, soulless rooms where their minds are molded by kuffar for eight hours a day—the very same spiritually dead people whose lives revolve around waiting to intoxicate themselves beyond cognition at the end of each and every week of their nihilistic, meaningless, purposeless existence.

Once, a son would walk in the footsteps of his father, learning a cherished, generational craft such as carpentry, acquiring not merely a trade but also a moral compass, shaped by the wisdom of seasoned elders.

Today, young minds spend eight hours a day in the company of their equally inexperienced peers, developing flawed moral notions and orientations. Is it any wonder then that our newspapers are replete with stories of young people committing acts of astounding cruelty, actions so monstrous in their nature that they defy the innocence of youth?

The home, once a sanctuary and a living, breathing citadel, has lost its essence, its soul. Within its walls, women once possessed the skills of nursing, midwifery, tailoring, cooking, counseling, and educating. In childbirth, they were surrounded by their kin, experienced in the arts of nurturing and delivery. A child’s first touch was the warm embrace of a loving relative, not the sterile glove of a complete stranger. But now, under the clinical, detached gaze of the obstetrician, childbirth is viewed not as a natural miracle but as a pathology.

From the home, women tended to both playground wounds and battle wounds. They possessed the skills to stitch flesh and cloth in equal measure.

The home, once the center of life’s great functions—birth, education, healing, and nurturing—, has been stripped of its purpose. These sacred duties have been siphoned off to the impersonal machinery of the state, an entity incapable of genuine care and concern.

Homes are no longer institutions. They are Airbnbs. Bodies may dwell within them as a place for eating and sleeping, but hearts dwell there no longer.

A powerful description of what is happening to our youth. My mother drove a school bus for a few years, and she is completely onboard with us homeschooling our children.

Al-Farsi continues to talk about the death of spiritual parenthood, where people would travel and be with a Shaykh for several years:

In the pre-modern world, a man lived with his shaykh, studied under him, and shared a contiguous period of life with him. A shaykh would take on only a handful of students, dedicating all his time, attention, and wisdom to these select few. He fed them, clothed them, and counseled them. From this intimate relationship emerged the great scholars of our tradition. Both a man and his wife would often be guided by the same shaykh (of course, while adhering to the dictates of the Shari’ah), under his spiritual tutelage and care.

Today, the modern madrasah system is but a pale imitation of post-industrial schooling, lacking the intimacy, the tarbiyah (nurturing), the tazkiyah (purification), and the islah (reform) that were once so central to the transmission of knowledge and virtue. The bond between teacher and student has become transactional, devoid of the deep personal connection that gave birth to our greatest scholars.

Although the ability to be with a Shaykh and spend years with him is more difficult, it is sad to see how parenting, which is the most natural student-teacher relationship, has become a shell of its former glory.

What your peers and friends say and do takes precedence over your parents advice, and parents easily give in without a fuss since, “everybody is doing it,” or because, “I just want my kid to be happy.”

Liberal tendencies.

The child is “in charge,” and the parent feels helpless, and they’re both miserable since no one is playing their role.

The end of the family unit is the end of a wholesome society.

How to live your life so your children can be successful.

Surah Kahf has so many hidden gems inside of it, and the one that really stuck with me today was about the righteous father who left behind two orphan boys.

This father who passed away, he did two important things:

1. He was a righteous man.

2. He saved for his family.

We all know that we have to earn for our families, and everyone takes this for granted.

Allah did not emphasize this in the ayah.

What did Allah emphasize?

“And their father had been a righteous man.”

وَأَمَّا ٱلْجِدَارُ فَكَانَ لِغُلَـٰمَيْنِ يَتِيمَيْنِ فِى ٱلْمَدِينَةِ وَكَانَ تَحْتَهُۥ كَنزٌۭ لَّهُمَا وَكَانَ أَبُوهُمَا صَـٰلِحًۭا فَأَرَادَ رَبُّكَ أَن يَبْلُغَآ أَشُدَّهُمَا وَيَسْتَخْرِجَا كَنزَهُمَا رَحْمَةًۭ مِّن رَّبِّكَ ۚ وَمَا فَعَلْتُهُۥ عَنْ أَمْرِى ۚ ذَٰلِكَ تَأْوِيلُ مَا لَمْ تَسْطِع عَّلَيْهِ صَبْرًۭا ٨٢

“And as for the wall, it belonged to two orphan boys in the city, and under the wall was a treasure that belonged to them, and their father had been a righteous man. So your Lord willed that these children should come of age and retrieve their treasure, as a mercy from your Lord. I did not do it ˹all˺ on my own. This is the explanation of what you could not bear patiently.”

Surah Kahf (18:82)

Allah SWT is telling us that if we put our trust in Him and follow the path towards Allah, Allah will take care of our affairs.

But at the same time, we have to do the work and try our best to make it happen!

The treasure that was buried was an active step done by the father, and he obviously had to earn it first and plan ahead.

Remember, tawakkul (trust in Allah) requires us to do our part first, and then leave the rest to Allah.

Don’t just invest in your children’s worldly future, but also remember that if you are righteous, then Allah will provide for them even better than what you have planned.

Make Allah your priority, earn for your family, plan for your family, and leave the rest to Allah.

Will your kids resent you?

If you don’t teach your kids about Islam, and make it a part of their life, they might resent you. Of course there should always be respect and good manners towards parents, but sometimes thoughts still creep in and if a parent deprives their child of sound Islamic knowledge, that child will always feel behind once they start practicing Islam. 

Not only that, but it can lead to families bickering and even splitting apart, especially if they are on different wavelengths in terms of following the religion.

If you practice, and you teach your kids to practice, your relationship in sha Allah will be fruitful, blessed, and strong. 

Unfortunately, there are probably a lot of people like this sister here asking this question.

Tips for a successful marriage.

Sr. Na’ima Robert talks about an important discussion that was very beneficial not only for prospective Muslims who want to get married, but also for those who have been married for years. 

A good listen, especially the first 10-15 minutes where she talks about her personal story of marriage, loss, and shukr (thankfulness). 

If there’s one thing I can say about this video, the advice about thankfulness that she was told by a friend was nothing short of genius and total submission to Allah.

Generative AI and “nudify” apps

Matt Burgess, from Wired.com (on arstechnica):

Major technology companies, including Google, Apple, and Discord, have been enabling people to quickly sign up to harmful “undress” websites, which use AI to remove clothes from real photos to make victims appear to be “nude” without their consent. More than a dozen of these deepfake websites have been using login buttons from the tech companies for months.

A WIRED analysis found 16 of the biggest so-called undress and “nudify” websites using the sign-in infrastructure from Google, Apple, Discord, Twitter, Patreon, and Line. This approach allows people to easily create accounts on the deepfake websites—offering them a veneer of credibility—before they pay for credits and generate images.

While bots and websites that create nonconsensual intimate images of women and girls have existed for years, the number has increased with the introduction of generative AI. This kind of “undress” abuse is alarmingly widespread, with teenage boys allegedly creating images of their classmates. Tech companies have been slow to deal with the scale of the issues, critics say, with the websites appearing highly in search results, paid advertisements promoting them on social media, and apps showing up in app stores.

This is another reason why women and girls in general, shouldn’t post their photos online. The fitna is already there even if the photos aren’t sexualized, but this is a whole other level of just destroying a girls reputation. 

Imagine if this became rampant in the Muslim community? It would just be a huge mess, with families’ reputations being tarnished and girls being slandered against left and right. Imagine a high school or middle school boy liking a muslim girl in school, and trying this feature on her. She may not even be one who posts photos online and might not even be involved in social media, but anyone can just take your photo these days and do whatever they want with it. 

This is a continuation of a trend that normalizes sexual violence against women and girls by Big Tech,” says Adam Dodge, a lawyer and founder of EndTAB (Ending Technology-Enabled Abuse). “Sign-in APIs are tools of convenience. We should never be making sexual violence an act of convenience,” he says. “We should be putting up walls around the access to these apps, and instead we're giving people a drawbridge.

Putting up walls around access to the apps might stop a few people, but those who really want to nudify someone will find a way to nudify them. 

Muslim parents should take heed and address these issues with their children, especially if they have cell phones and are on social media.