17th Dhul-Qa'dah 1447H
Assalamu'alaikum,
A few weeks ago, I sat down to write the piece on decolonizing Muslim corporate culture. I had the ideas in my head and spent an entire morning handwriting the piece and building the argument.
By afternoon, I typed up the piece and asked AI to help me polish it and improve on the ideas like a trusted editor would.
Rather than publishing the AI polished version straight away, I decided to sleep on it, and the next day, I reviewed the draft away from my computer and edited it further.
Then I went back to my computer, typed up the edits, and ran it by AI for more edits. This back and forth got me into such a flow state that by late Asr, I had a final draft I was happy to share with some trusted advisors before publishing on our website the next day.
What I just described has become my new writing regimen ever since AI became very good at writing:
Step 1: Think and do research first, and write the article/newsletter by hand
Step 2: Type up the piece and do a 2nd layer of thinking whilst typing
Step 3: Pass it to AI for editing and thinking it through
Step 4: Work away from the computer to edit the AI edited piece
Step 5: Go back to AI with new edits and work back and forth until finalised
I still hold on to the belief that AI should never replace your thinking (or your soul for that matter), but you can use it for researching, editing, and polishing a piece.
Alhamdulillah, with this human + AI writing approach, what would have taken me 2-3 weeks in the past can now be done in a few days.
Despite this "boost in productivity," I'll be honest - I sometimes feel a bit of unease and find myself questioning the process:
Am I rushing through my writing?
Am I losing my craft?
Am I getting intellectually lazy?
And what do I do with all this extra time? Do I just pump out more articles?
So I reached out to my friend Dr. Waleed Kadous - an AI engineer who has built products at Google, Uber, and Canva - and asked him to co-write a piece with me on how to think and work in the age of AI.
After many drafts (with the help of AI, of course), we settled on a piece we're both proud of:
Here's the heart of what we found.
For decades, hustle culture has worshipped the idea of ‘busy work’: long hours, late-night emails, and always being ‘on’.
However, in the age of AI, if your professional value is built on doing busy work, then AI has already replaced you.
If you were spending hours entering numbers in a spreadsheet, preparing documents for presentations, writing, or coding, AI can do a lot of the grunt work that used to take hours, in minutes.
And for many knowledge workers, this feels threatening: “If a model can do in three minutes what used to take me three hours, then what am I supposed to be doing? And how do I justify my role?”
The same thing happened when the internet arrived, and people could "Google" anything instead of visiting a library. Just because you had a quicker way to search doesn't mean you're a scholar overnight. You still need to do the learning, the researching, the synthesizing, and the critical and creative thinking.
So here's our argument in the article: the moment doing becomes cheap, the only things left that carry real weight are:
Why you're doing the work (niyyah)
What you choose to work on, and what to leave alone
How well you're doing it (ihsan), including going the extra mile to challenge what AI produces, and not just lazily accepting what it gives you
If you've also been struggling with this new paradigm shift in knowledge work, here's what Waleed and I cover in the full piece:
What AI has actually done to a typical 40-hour work week (with real numbers from both of us)
Five Islamic tools that train us in exactly the skills the age of AI demands
How to think about the hours AI has handed back to you
Going back to the four questions I raised earlier, after working on this article with Waleed, here's where I've landed:
1. Am I rushing through my writing?
Given how easy it is now to go from 1st draft to final piece, I actually spend more time on what we call the "tadbir" part in the article - the thinking, the researching, the slow writing by hand, the sleeping on a piece so I'm sure I've thought it through. Case in point: this is the 5th draft of this newsletter.
2. Am I losing my craft?
This one is harder to tell. I feel that with AI carrying some of the heavy lifting, I'm more willing to try new writing styles and experiment with new ideas I never thought I had time or resources for before. Of course, the art of writing requires both skill and practice, so I have to keep both front and centre as I continue to write, and not get lazy.
3. Am I getting intellectually lazy?
If you approach working with AI as a thinking crutch instead of a thinking partner, I can see how easy it would be to drift into intellectual laziness.
So I've taken it upon myself to be a critic of anything AI produces, not simply accepting what it writes just because it sounds polished. Pairing that with the curiosity AI has unlocked in me, I'm now exploring topics and ideas I never had the bandwidth to scratch the itch on before.
4. What do I do with all this extra time?
This was the biggest aha moment for me. and the realisation that AI has genuinely upended hustle culture.
If I'm done with my work by Dhuhr because AI compressed my execution time, what's telling me that I should stay till 5 or 6 pm?
There are days I've gone home early and spent quality time with my kids, and I don't feel guilty about it, I feel grateful for the blessing.
Thanks to AI, I'm also involved in a number of new projects I never thought I'd have the time for. More on those soon, insha’Allah.
If any of these questions are sitting with you too, the full article goes much deeper into the framework Waleed and I built around them.
I'd genuinely love to hear what resonates with you from the article. Hit reply and let me know.
Sincerely,
