What Hath Allah Wrought? The Global Invention of Prescriptive Machines for the Islamic Consumer, 1975–2010 (July 2021)
Unlike histories emphasizing conflicts between religion and technology, this article brings to light a series of religio-technological innovations. It analyzes a dataset of international patents inspired by the practice of Islam, from the first electronic Islamic wristwatch to "The Muslim Xbox." Starting in the 1970s with a few Euro-Muslim inventions, incremental innovations addressing the "needs" of devout Muslims grew exponentially over the course of three decades as inventors from the United States to China aimed to profit from an Islamic revival and emerging "Islamic market." These inventors' devices are described here as "prescriptive machines," arguably designed not for religious flexibility but rather as disciplining mechanisms to train imagined Muslim consumers to conform to a version of orthopraxy. The article ends with an appendix explaining the methodology of researching massive international and multilingual digital databases to establish the dataset of ostensibly "Islamic" patents.
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