Nostr notes by PodSystems

New chapter of Cyber Faerie has been posted. Please read and ...

2026-07-16T10:37:57Z

New chapter of Cyber Faerie has been posted. Please read and provide feedback as all chapters are rough-drafts.

Be sure to follow Mythos Majlis (npub1xk4…q85a) for more as they will be launching into full swing here soon with the goal of producing many more epic stories.

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The last time he stopped to pray, the bird had been there again. He had not actually seen it and his old suit did not register it, but it was clear in his mind that the bird was real. Its shadow, a shape against the light, present at the edge of his periphery, moving in a direction he could follow but not locate. He tried to turn his head to catch a glimpse of it, to look up and spot it soaring overhead, but it remained an unverified perception that he noted as Axis had taught him.

Note where it points. Note whether it changes.

It had changed. Over the days since the crossing, the travel north and east into the interior — it had moved from intermittent to consistent to something more. The only word he had for it was attentive, which was strange. He did not expect a recurring anomalous perception to feel like it was engaging with him.

The Damascus basin opened ahead of him. Through the suit's enhanced filters the ruins read as integrated layers: standing walls that had survived by becoming less, the outlines of streets pressed into the dust, the steel frames of structures from a century he could not name, rising from older stone foundations like a word written in the wrong alphabet. Here and there a dome or minaret broke the skyline, not with height, but as steadfast warriors that had outlasted the people who built them.

The air moved slowly in the valley as if the whole ruins were an empty room with the knowledge of what used to be but devoid of breath to tell its story. Instead the scar of the crater greeted the silence with a ghostly yawn. He had been formed with the knowledge of this place since before this first view. Axis had made certain of that. The hole in the Damascus basin. The nuclear exchange from nearly a century ago, the detonation, the fallout spreading across the Syrian Interior. Decades of decay since the Excursion itself — the catastrophic pole shift and what it had done to everything that depended on the grid, the infrastructure, the chain of systems that human civilization had learned to call normal. The Rebuilding. The patchwork of what had been restored and the larger patchwork of what had not. He had received all of this as information but was receiving it now as fact.

What the information had not prepared him for was the weight of the unseen realm here. He had some foresight — enough to know its edges — yet the accumulated presence of this place hung like fog across the valley. The scent of death had long left the air but its residue remained. You felt it pressing from no single direction before you understood it. This part of the fallout zone was not the same as the ghost-town melancholy he had felt in the southwest, which was the grief of absence — communities that were here and were not. This was different. This was mass violent death that had not dispersed as the radiation had, and he knew he was not confusing this with the pressure and hum of his suit.

His radiation counter held at a number that meant survivable. He had stopped reading it as warning this far into the wasteland. Axis had told him once that the desert wanted to come back to God. She had said it the way she said most things — as if simply remarking on the weather — and did not repeat it or expand it or ask whether he understood. He was understanding it now and even before fully knowing how to articulate it he knew the place was trying to return.

He walked on. The suit pinged once:

<< Reminder: Asr in fourteen minutes. >>

He checked the time, noted his position relative to the ruins ahead, and kept walking. He would find flat ground before the prayer. The descent into the valley was not a perilous slope anyway. Axis had calculated that ground zero nearest the crater might still be enough to cause malfunction with his suit, but the remainder of the city could be traversed uninhibited.

The earth has been made a masjid, she had said. Every piece of it. Including this piece. Especially this piece.

He thought about her less than he expected to on a journey this solitary. What surfaced instead was method — the training fitted so that what he needed would be present even without her, like a brace fitted for a body that had not yet grown into it. The instruction she had given him before the crossing had looked like simplicity.

Go to Jerusalem. Receive the contact when it arrives.

He had turned it over every day of the journey. The incompleteness of it was the point — he understood that, or thought he did. You cannot practice foresight while scanning for a predetermined target. Correct foresight is attentiveness to what is actually there. You prepare the instrument and the instrument does its work. What Axis did not tell him, probably to benefit his training or because she, herself did not know, was what contact would feel like — whether it would arrive as recognition or as confirmation of what he was already sensing. He knew which he would prefer. He was trying not to prefer it.

The ruins to his left had been residential once. He could read that in the proportions of the doorways, the spacing of the walls, the ghost of a courtyard behind a collapsed arch. Someone's home. A family's accumulation of the ordinary. He kept walking. He had learned early to pass sites like this, because stopping produced in him a fullness he could not afford to carry — the sense of lives concentrated in a place, present differently now, oriented away from the material plane in a way he could feel but not clearly see. There was death here that he was not equipped to navigate. He knew this. He walked through the edge of the stillness and kept walking.

The suit pinged again:

<< Asr in four minutes. >>

He found a space between the ruins where the ground was flat and the air came from a direction that did not carry the zone's deeper smell. He pressed his palms to the dusty ground and drew them across his visor and over his hands, turned east, and took the position. In the stillness after the opening takbir, before the first recitation, the bird arrived. Not as vision, not as anomalous perception to be noted and filed. As presence. Immediate and located and — he had no other word for it — close.

He completed the prayer. When he rose, the pull of the sighting forced him to turn. The bird had flown right in front of him. He had, of course, not seen the direction it had disappeared, but he did see a direction.

Northwest.

The suit mapped the shadow of the bird's path and confirmed his sighting. He stood with it for a moment after rising. He had been walking northeast all day and Asr had faced him nearly due east. The bird had gone northwest, and when he turned toward it the late light gave the ruins an eerie shape. The radiation counter was unchanged. The suit reported nothing else. But in the accumulated weight of what his developing foresight had been perceiving since the first morning in the zone, something was assembling itself. Unlike the dead — concentrated in a place, anchored, still — this had movement that was distinct from the shadows lengthening over the stone. And the direction was there the way a name is there when you wake from a dream already fading: known before he could account for where it came from.

He took this as a bearing. The fortress had trained him to receive signs this way — not to act on the first, but to hold it and wait for what else would cross it. His northern path would still bring him into the city. He moved onward, picking his way through the collapsed sections, the suit's inertial overlay tracking his position in the basin. The afternoon light was at the angle that gave the ruins their most deceptive shape — each shadow suggesting a passage that closed on approach, each standing wall a threshold without a room behind it. Three days of reading ruins had taught him not to let them slow him. He was a node on a mission.

He had been walking for perhaps twenty minutes, the ruins thickening and then thinning as he passed through what had been a residential district, when the smell arrived. Not dramatically. It did not announce itself. He was mid-step when he realized he had been registering it for two or three strides before consciously identifying it. A scent, green and living and rain-damp, arriving from no single direction, carrying no foothold in anything the zone could produce. The suit's filtration continued unchanged. The display showed nothing.

He stopped. The smell was arriving inside his helm through some channel the suit had no instrument to account for. The smell had a depth the zone's own smells did not have. The fallout zone smelled of mineral dust and chemical residue and the persistent low note of things that had not finished ending. This was not residue, not chemical artifact. Grown in earth and breathing and needing water. A garden. He stood in the ruins and breathed what was not there, and a memory surfaced.

A courtyard. White walls holding afternoon heat. A fig tree, its dark canopy of fig leaves in high summer, dense and still. He remembered his hands around a branch reaching for the fruit because he was a child and reaching was what you did before you had learned to measure ambition against probability. Someone above him had laughed — not at him but with the tenderness of someone recognizing what they had once also done. He had felt, in that moment, that the world was structured to hold him. That things would not fall without warning. That the people who knew him would always be there the way the tree was always there, rooted in ground he had never thought to question.

He held the memory as carefully as he could. The memory had arrived fully formed and was already receding. He held what remained: shade, a green warmth, the sense of being known and unremarkable to whatever knew him. The smell thinned as he moved further northwest, the ruins changing character — residential density giving way to broader collapse, the streets having been wider here before they ceased to be streets. He moved by the suit's inertial overlay, following the direction. He was still carrying the garden's warmth. Not the forms of it — the fig tree had withdrawn, the white walls, the pitch of a laugh he could no longer locate in time. But the warmth remained the way warmth remains in stone after the sun has moved on, and he walked with it, which was not what he had expected. He had expected the memory to go entirely. It did not.

Something arrived from ahead. Not from the zone. Not from the dead — their presence pressed inward from every direction without a source. This had a source. It arrived in the register where his foresight lived and it carried warmth that was not the zone's heat and not the sun's, now descending to his left. From a point that remained at the same distance however far he walked toward it. The bird had given him a direction. What was now with him confirmed that direction from the other end. Axis had told him what this was. She had described it carefully. In a garden. Being in it was not the same as being told.

He stopped for a moment. Not from uncertainty — what had arrived from the northwest had a radiance his suit could not account for and he wanted to be still in it rather than moving through it. He stood in the ruins and let himself be in it. Then he walked on. The warmth he had carried since the garden smell and the warmth now arriving from the northwest were not two things. He walked with this without trying to account for it. He trusted what he was receiving.

Then the pressure arrived alongside the warmth, distinct from it. Not wind — the zone's own air moved flat and purposeless. This was drawing from the northwest, gentle and specific, as if a conclusion had been reached about where he should be. Where the warmth said there, the pressure said now.

Come.

That pull was enough.

The ruins gave way. Not suddenly — the transition from dense collapse to open ground took fifty meters, the rubble lowering, the standing walls ending, the sky widening. He reached the edge of a space that had been a large open area before it ceased to be anything. The foundation of a substantial structure was all that remained in the ruined plaza. The afternoon light lay flat across it.

He stopped at the edge. Fifty meters across, perhaps sixty. The warmth had gathered — not dispersed across the northwest as it had been through the walking, but concentrated at a point across the open space, the far edge of the plaza, the suit reporting nothing, his foresight reporting a presence it had no precedent for and no difficulty identifying.

The suit's anomaly sensor, which had been entirely silent through the bird's passage, through the smell, through the warmth and the pressure and everything else that had guided him here, registered something now for the first time.

Not for what had guided him here.

For her.

She was at the far edge of the plaza. The steadiness in his hands surprised him. He remained still and looked across the ruined plaza at the figure the suit could not classify.

The suit's anomaly sensor continued its question mark as he walked toward her — consistent and unanswered. In three days of walking the zone the sensor had flagged radiation variations, structural instability in certain ruins, twice a chemical signature that meant go around. It had never produced a question mark before her.

He moved across the plaza at the pace Axis had taught him when approaching the unknown: committed enough to show intention, measured enough to allow response. His pulse, which Axis had not trained, was ahead of him. She turned to face him before he had closed half the distance. He noted this without breaking pace. Not the movement of surprise. She had registered his approach and was deciding what to do about it, not retreating but not coming toward him either. She stood at the far edge of the plaza with the quality of someone who had spent time learning how to wait in uncertain places.

Through the filters his helm read nothing: no thermal output, nothing metabolic, no chemical signature, the suit producing only its question mark with increasing insistence. Through his foresight she was the opposite. The stones behind her were stones. She was not. She was more present than the standing walls, more detailed than anything else in his field of vision. She had a vividness the ruins absolutely lacked. Whatever direction of distinction ran between her and the material world, it ran entirely the wrong way. She wore no suit but rather what looked like linen, wrapped rather than sewn in a way that he had not seen before, simple at the shoulders and gathered at the waist. The color of it held a luminance that did not correspond to the afternoon light. She was young — probably only slightly older than himself. Dark hair, uncovered. Not even a mask to filter the toxic air. Her exposed face, as he closed the last of the distance, was working. Not fear. Not threat. More the expression someone makes when they are mentally working through a puzzle — examining, carefully, whatever pieces remain. And beneath that, or behind it, something he could not place yet.

He walked the last few meters to where she stood. She was already speaking before he fully stopped — not to him, he understood immediately, but at him — a stream of sound in a language he could not make out. He caught the structure of it: subject, verb, a possible object. He caught nothing else. He raised one hand, open — the gesture for wait — and she stopped.

<< Language family: Semitic. No dialect match in database. More dialogue needed for phonemic analysis. >>

He tried Arabic. A full sentence, then a shorter one, then a single word. She listened as if trying to extract structure from sound that would not yield its meaning. He recognized this because he was doing the same thing in the other direction. He stripped further back. Reached for what Axis had built into him — not language exactly but territory, the shared ground of scripture, the roots that predated the branching. He tried the oldest available thing.

"Shalom."

A recognition moved across her face. She took it in and turned it over. What she gave back was not the same word but something that shared its skeleton, shaped by a different mouth in a different century.

"Shlama."

He understood it. He reached for the corresponding root in the Arabic he carried.

"Salam."

What she said next was longer — a phrase in that same impossible-to-follow language — but he caught one piece of it surfacing like familiar ground through water. "Maran." Our Lord.

"Rabbana," he said back to her. She went very still.

He waited, letting it settle. In his training he had spent significant time on the patience that follows genuine contact — the instinct was always to push, to confirm, to add more. To stop and let what had landed finish was the better practice.

She touched her own chest. What she said next was not a name he had a category for. It moved across the distance between them and did not land clearly on either side. He tried to repeat it. She shook her head — not with frustration, but with the patience of someone who understood that what she was asking his mouth to do was genuinely difficult. She tried again. Slower. Giving care to the sound near the end of it with a softness in the arrangement of the syllables.

"Margan," he said.

An approximation. He knew it was an approximation. She considered it as you consider a translation that has thinned in the crossing but kept the bones of the original.

She did not correct him.

He touched his own chest.

"Harith," he said.

She said it back with a precision that surprised him — the Arabic letters sitting more naturally in her mouth than he had expected, the emphatic h landing correctly on the first attempt.

The suit pinged:

<< Maghrib. >>

He stopped. He held up one finger — not a gesture from his training exactly, but older and more instinctual than training. She understood it and waited.

He found the qibla in the east and took the position. In the opening takbir he was aware of her at the edge of his peripheral vision, unmoving. He let the awareness be there without acting on it. The prayer was the prayer. Axis had taught him to pray in more distracting circumstances than this.

He recited Al-Ma'un and Al-Ikhlas, and completed Maghrib in the ruins of the plaza as the first stars became visible over the fallout zone.

When he turned back a brightness had arrived in her face — a calm that seemed, even, to warm her. He looked at her for a long moment. The warmth was not surprise — it was recognition. She knew what prayer was.

Then, in a low voice, she said: "Shema."

He knew this word from his training. Hear. She was asking him to hear what she was about to say.

She recited. Her language moved through the roofless room with the force of words said ten thousand times in ten thousand places by people who understood them as survival — not recitation but bone, the thing underneath everything else. He caught the shape before he caught the words. The shape was unmistakable. It was the same shape as what he had just said.

"Maran elahan. Maran ehad."

<< Phonemic match: root pattern [h-d] consistent with Arabic 'ahad' (one). >>

He had just said ahad in the second rakat. He felt the root between the two words like a handshake across millennia of diverging language that had not diverged all the way down.

"Ahad," he said.

She looked at him differently. He did not have a name for what had changed, only that it had.

"Ehad," she said back. Then, carefully: "Allah?"

"Allah," he said. And then, because the moment was asking: "Al-hamdu lillahi rabb al-alamin."

She listened to this with her whole attention. She said: "Elah d'alma." He caught the same grammar, the same root, the same thing said in different mouths across a distance he was only beginning to grasp.

They sat with this. The walls held their warmth. The stars continued their document.

Then she said: "Muhammad."

Just the name. The question in it was precise and enormous.

He named the chain first: "... Ibrahim. Musa. Isa." He paused on Isa and watched her face do the thing it had done before — something crossing it too quickly to read, there and gone. He continued: "Muhammad." He held up his hand, fingers spread, and moved through them one by one — five prophets, the connective spine of divine revelation. Then his other hand: the chain continuing, extending, and then — he closed his fist. Sealed.

She understood the gesture. He watched it land. What crossed her face was not a peaceful understanding. It was the stillness that comes after falling.

"Khatam," he said. The seal. The last.

She said a word in her language that he did not know but that came from deep in her — not a question, an acknowledgment.

They were quiet.

Then she pointed at him as if not to ask who are you but what are you doing here alone, in this.

He tried: pointed east, said "Al-Quds." I was sent there.

She looked at him for a long moment. "Lama?" Close enough to the Arabic that he caught it. Why?

He opened his hands. I don't fully know.

She looked at his open hands. Then she opened hers — the same gesture, returned.

What passed between them in that exchange felt, to Harith, like the first genuinely honest communication they had managed rather than approximate communication. Two people in an impossible situation, sent to the same place by a trust neither could explain.

He pointed at her with the same question. Why?

What she gave back was longer than anything she had attempted — a sequence of fragments he followed only partially, losing the thread and recovering it and losing it again. He felt the effort in it. Whatever had happened to her, she was trusting him with it before he earned the language to receive it. But the architecture arrived even when the specifics did not: something had been destroyed. She had been somewhere, a long time. She had been pushed out. She was going toward whatever had survived.

They stood in the ruined plaza as the light was fading. The suit's anomaly sensor had been asking its question since he crossed the plaza and had not stopped. He had stopped expecting it to arrive at an answer. The ruins of Damascus extended in every direction. Jerusalem was east and a little south. Whatever she was, she was not going west. He gestured once, in the direction they were both already facing. She looked at his hand, at the direction it indicated, and then back at him. She began walking and he fell into step beside her.

She walked faster than he did. He had been aware of this since the first few minutes of leaving the plaza — she moved through the ruined streets freely, without the cautious route-reading he had been practicing all day. No sight-line assessment before intersections, no checking underfoot, no calculating the structural risk of a damaged wall. She moved through the zone as if it had no claims on her, which, as far as he could tell, it did not. He matched her pace, the suit's navigation light casting its low ambient glow across the rubble — functional, not dramatic, the suit adjusting for the dark on its own.

She paused at a corner and looked back at him. Her face had come alive. More curious now. She had been observing him since the plaza; the suit's external light held her attention. She pointed at the suit. Her hand asking what words could not.

"Harith," he said — not because he thought this answered her question, but because it was all he had to offer.

She shook her head with a patience that indicated she already had that piece of information. She pointed at the suit again. He tried to explain. He waved at the invisible hazard of the air around them, then touched the suit's protective surface and pointed at himself. This is why I'm alive. She watched this mime with genuine attention and then motioned to herself as if to indicate how she was not wearing one.

"Nam," he said, acknowledging this. She pointed at him again. He did not have the words. Her eyes found this funnier than she fully expressed. She turned and kept walking.

At the next intersection the suit flagged a structural warning — the building to their right had a compromised load-bearing section, risk elevated. The notation arrived in his peripheral display, brief and practical. He reached out to redirect her path with a brief automatic motion, the action of someone trained to manage hazards for the people around them.

She stopped. Looked at his directing hand. Looked at the building and at the path he had moved her toward. He pointed at the building. Made a falling gesture and pointed at the path around it. She looked at the building, confused, then pointed at herself and at the building as if to say this would not have been a problem for me.

He touched his chest. "Harith," he said, because it was still the only answer he had, and because giving the same inadequate answer twice in a row was, apparently, the best he could manage.

Her face changed. He did not know toward what. She looked at the path he had taken them to and pointed along it.

"Derekh," she said.

He had the word immediately — the Hebrew road word, which also meant the way a person walks through their life.

"Tareeq," he said.

She tried it, adjusting the q naturally in her mouth. She indicated the two of them, then the road. He nodded.

"Tareeq," she said once more, with satisfaction as she followed his path.

They walked on.

The path took them through a section of older collapse — the ruins here from a different century than the pre-Excursion construction, readable in the material, the thickness of the walls, the proportions of what remained. She slowed slightly in this section and her attention oriented differently. He was learning to read what her slowing meant. He gave her the space of it, matching her pace when she moved on.

The suit updated quietly:

<< Dialect analysis: Western Aramaic, historical variant. Estimated period: pre-6th century CE. Confidence: 41%. >>

He read it twice. Historical variant. Pre-6th century. Not a living language. He thought about what Axis had given him, about the roots he had been recognizing since the plaza, about the words in her mouth carrying the weight of a language that had been absent for longer than the Excursion had been a memory. He looked at her moving through the older ruins with the care she gave to things she was reading rather than seeing. He kept walking alongside her and let what the suit had told him find its own place. It needed more input data to validate but he sensed the analysis was correct.

The structure presented itself against the lighter dark of the open sky — two walls still meeting at their original height, the roof long gone, the interior open. The structure had been residential once. Not large. The walls had absorbed the day's heat and were releasing it now, which the suit registered as a minor thermal variation and which he registered as marginally better than standing in the open. He pointed.

She looked at it before he had found a word. "Bayit," she said.

"Bayt," he said.

She looked at him and he recognized the look — confirmation. She must have suspected this. He led them in.

He moved to the corner where the two walls met and lowered himself to the ground. She stopped in the middle of the open space, clearly watching the mechanics of his suit. The food supply procedure looked, from the outside, like nothing at all — a connection at the collar, a pack the suit processed internally. Every meal in the zone had been conducted in solitude. Watching her watch him now — her bewilderment deepening with each second of nothing visibly happening — he almost laughed. He understood what the procedure looked like from outside. He made the eating gesture with empty hands. Her confusion crossed into disbelief. There was no good way to demonstrate that he had just eaten so he let the subject rest.

He detached the water supply and extended it toward her. He did not offer it casually — offering of water to a traveler was obligation before it was generosity. She was not precisely a traveler in any sense he had words for, but the gesture was a kindness that would translate better than words.

She smiled, then shook her head, once.

No thermal output, no reaction to the radiation, no need for water. He found himself wondering when she had last needed anything the material world provided. He carried this alongside everything else the suit had been telling him all evening and did not push.

She sat down on the opposite side of the open space, not adjacent but not far, and looked up through the roofless room at the sky. He looked up too. The zone's atmosphere carried its residual luminescence, the sky not quite the color it had been before the exchange. But the stars were there. The same stars she had known, he supposed. He could not begin to imagine across how many nights. She had found something in the northern sky and appeared to be studying it. Whatever she was looking for, it was not where she expected.

"Lelaya," he heard her say, quietly.

He checked his reckoning — the angle of the stars, the time since Maghrib, the position of the night. Isha would fall about now. She had named the night at the moment he calculated to pray in it. He looked at her. She was not looking at him but toward the northern sky, toward whatever was wrong up there, without appearing to notice the timing.

"Layla," he confirmed.

She lowered her gaze from the sky to him. He looked across at her.

"Isha," he said, naming what was about to happen. She did not have that word. But she had watched him stop already, take position, and pray. She understood the shape of the announcement without the word. She settled into her side of the roofless house and gave him the room.

He sat in stillness after the prayer. His lips moved through the salawat without needing his attention. The repetition was its own kind of wakefulness. He needed it. The tiredness had been building all afternoon, held at the edges by the zone's demands and by everything since the plaza, and now in the quiet after the prayer it pressed on him like an opponent that knew it would eventually win.

He was not going to sleep. Axis had been direct about this: you do not sleep in a compromised environment with the suit's systems unsupervised. He had trained for extended wakefulness on the fortress walls, nights when she kept him standing watch over the sea for no reason but to learn what the body does at three in the morning when nothing is happening and everything in you wants to stop. He was not going to sleep.

In the quiet, she spoke. He caught structure before content: a night prayer, servants standing watch, a blessing. But it was not the Aramaic he was learning to parse. The suit caught the shift before he did.

<< Language match: Classical Hebrew. Translating. >>

She was reciting. He could tell the cadence was a psalm even before the suit rendering completed. He looked at her across the roofless house. She was standing with her gaze upward, her hands slightly raised, looking at the eastern sky through the open roof.

Look, bless God, all you servants of God, who stand in God's house through the nights. Lift up your hands in holiness, and bless God. May God bless you from the Holy Hill, He Who made the heavens and the earth.

She finished the psalm and lowered her hands.

<< Phonemic note: Hebrew root [b-r-k] consistent with Arabic 'baraka' (blessing). >>

The word landed in him before the suit had finished displaying it.

Baraka.

He knew what this word meant in his world. Not what it meant in a dictionary — what it meant in the rooms of Futuwwa and their grief. The divine blessing that flows through the chain of prophetic transmission. The thing that makes a genuine spiritual encounter different from an intellectually stimulating one. The thing that had been absent from this world since before anyone alive could remember, since the silsila severed and the chain stopped transmitting what it had always carried. Every templex knew it could not transmit baraka. Every axis in every ring knew their formation was the best available approximation of what was missing. The word carried significant loss and hope.

"Baraka," he said.

He had not planned to say it. It came out how his name had come out before — not because it answered her question, but because it was the truest thing available to him.

She sat back down, giving him a bashful glance.

"Baraka," she said back, quietly, as if confirming a suspicion. He recognized in her response more than a simple vocabulary match. She had heard something in the word that he had not put there.

The psalm was still in the air between them. He turned over what the suit had given him — the servants, the night, the holiness. Qodesh. He knew that root. It was sitting in Al-Quds, the name he carried for where they were both going. The holy city.

"Quds," he said, pointing east. Then at her. "Qodesh?"

She caught it and nodded.

"Margan," he said, carefully testing a sentence: "Margan — am — berit?" Your people. A covenant?

She looked at him. He watched her take in his broken speech. She nodded slowly.

"Berit khadashah. Dammeseq." She pointed through the broken wall at the ruins around them.

Damascus. New covenant. So she was Christian then. He held up six fingers to share the foundation of his community. "Sittah. Futuwwa." He pointed at himself.

"Sittah," she repeated. He watched her count six on her own hand and look at him with a question in her face. He nodded. Holding up her own hands she wiggled her fingers, slowly bringing them together before fanning her hands out. He took it as her telling him her community had been many but was now gone.

They sat with this.

After a moment she pointed east. "Yerushalayim — bayit?"

He considered this. He had never been to the Free City before yet it seemed safe to assume she had. But when? "La. Yerushalayim derekh." Jerusalem was part of the mission, the road itself.

"Lama derekh?" she asked.

He paused. This was the question he had been asking himself since his journey began.

Go to Jerusalem. Receive the contact when it arrives.

"Margan — tariq wahid. Al-Quds, uhhh... Yerushalayim." He pointed at himself, then at her, then east. One road, together.

He did not fully understand why he felt the need to formalize their practical arrangement. But the Futuwwa oath bound him to guardianship of whatever genuine transmission survived. He had not expected to find it in a girl speaking a dead language in the fallout zone. He was not certain he had found it, but he was certain he was not leaving her here.

The tiredness pressed again. He pushed it back. They were both looking at the same sky. It was the northern stars that held her attention longest — the same troubled quadrant she had been returning to since they entered the shelter. She pointed at the cluster that was wrong. He followed her gaze and called up the suit's astronomical overlay. The stars were where they should be. North was north. He checked the precession tables built into his suit and ran the displacement.

<< Stellar precession present, consistent with significant elapsed time. >>

He pointed at the star she was troubled by. Then he held his hands apart to show a small gap. He widened the gap slightly. She watched his hands move apart. He kept widening the gap until his arms were fully extended. He watched her do the calculation — she was fast at this — and watched the answer arrive not as a number but as reckoning. She looked at the space between his arms and then at the sky and let out a deep sigh.

Neither of them spoke for a time after that.

The silence settled, and in the silence, in the warmth of the walls and the exhaustion of the day's journey, he rested his eyes and thought of home.

The walls of the fortress were warm under his hands. The sea smell came up from below the cliff, a mist of salt and iodine. He could hear the sea gate, three floors down, closing for the night — the sound of iron on stone that meant the fortress was sealed. He used to fall asleep to that sound.

The garden was below the wall. He could smell the apricot, lemon and fig trees from here. He could almost reach out and touch them but they remained out of reach, just like in his childhood. Oh, what he would give for a taste now. The suit packets were nutritious but utterly lacking in flavor.

As he looked up at the fruit he glimpsed a bird above the northern wall. The bird. It was strange that he would think of it now. He watched it from below, from the courtyard. It was larger, more detailed, as if he could count each feather. It turned its head to look his way, then lifted and circled down into the garden landing on the branch of a nearby apricot tree. He took a step forward and then nearly doubled backward as the bird shifted to stare directly at him.

"If you can speak to the moon, why pour your heart out to a flower?"

It poked at a fruit, offering it to him. He picked it and ate, hardly registering the tart honey-cream sweetness. He had seen sailors with talking parrots before but this was not that kind of bird.

Then it lifted again, heading southwest over the water. He watched it go and knew it was heading where he needed to follow.

Then the air shifted and he found himself above the water. The sea was below him — not far below, close enough to see the light moving on its surface. The bird was ahead. A coastline appeared and passed beneath them. He had never flown at this speed before and the height made everything into threads and patterns, terrain folding and unfolding as they moved. Islands surfaced where mountains had once peaked. The southwest was mostly water.

But not just water. There were faces in it. Not reflected, pressing upward from below the waterline. Mouths open, not drowning because they were already past drowning. He knew them without recognizing them. They were not from the fortress. They were from the city he had been walking through all day, and they had followed him here.

And there she was — Margan, walking on the air above the water with the certainty of someone following a map only she could read. She was looking down into the water, beyond the other faces. He could see her reflection in the waves, intent and focused. She reached in and pulled out an orb-like pearl so large it needed both hands to contain it. It glowed with a light the color of which he had never seen. She stood and held it up and as she did a bolt of electricity flashed across the sky, striking the orb and knocking them both into the water.

Dead hands were everywhere. They both stood quickly in what was now shallows. He had not seen her afraid before. The hands were pulling at them both with blind desire. They had drowned in horrors unimaginable and were reaching for anything that might hear them in their unfinished need. He tried to move toward her but was paralyzed in the water, thick with hungry hands. She was holding the fragments of the orb against her chest, desperately trying to put them back together as the light in them flickered and went dark one by one.

He reached for her. The water was at his chest now and the hands were everywhere and the last piece of light in the broken orb went out and the bird was gone and the fortress was gone and there was only the water and the dead and her hand in his hand, and then —

He awoke with the touch.

She was standing next to him. His heart was loud in the quiet room. The morning twilight seemed to pass through her like through the open roof. She had been there. In his sleep. He did not know if the touch had happened in the dream or in the room, and he was embarrassed to ask, and she did not offer to explain.

He stood and pressed his palms to the dry stones of the wall and drew them across his face and over his hands, found the qibla, and prayed Fajr with an awkward urgency. The horizon had not yet lightened. But it would.

He was into the second raka when he heard her beneath his recitation, quiet and deliberate and in her own register. "Maran atha." Come, Lord. Her tradition's deepest summoning, in her Aramaic. She was not praying with him. She was praying alongside him, toward the same direction. He completed Fajr and carried what he had heard with him when he turned back.

The light in the east was the grey that comes before the color. The zone's ruins took the first light in silence, the standing walls casting long shadows across the ground. The first light found them both still in the roofless house. It made the room smaller than the dark had — ordinary walls, ordinary ground, someone's home once. She was sitting where she had been through the night. The light reached her face before it reached his and he saw her clearly for the first time since the plaza — not through the suit's filters, not through the dark, not through the dream. Just her, in the morning, still here.

He wanted to say something about the night. Not about the dream — he did not have the structure for that in any language — but about the rest. The prayers. The psalm. The word baraka between them. He opened his mouth but found he had no words in any language available to him. He closed it.

She watched him not speak and did not fill the silence. After a moment, she turned her gaze east.

He pointed east and said: "Tareeq." Not as discovery this time. As greeting.

She turned it over. Then, "Derekh."

She almost smiled.

They stood. There was nothing to gather, nothing in the ruined house that belonged to either of them.

They walked east toward the denser ruins of what had been the city's center. The morning light came in low and flat, turning the standing walls into thin shadows of themselves, the dust lifting in the air moving through corridors of collapsed stone. His radiation counter held at survivable. The suit's anomaly sensor had resumed its question mark about her with the morning, as if it had rested overnight and returned to its unresolved work.

He became aware as they walked that she was seeing things he was not. Not the material ruins — those she moved through the same way he did. What held her attention was beyond his perception. She stopped briefly at a location that looked to him indistinguishable from any other collapsed wall, any other empty ground, and the receiving crossed her face — brief, deliberate, the dead were giving her something — before she moved on. He did not ask. He had understood from the night that she could not tell him directly. He would learn to read it in her face or he would miss it. He chose to watch her face.

She stopped once between two standing sections of wall and said something in Aramaic with the cadence he recognized from overnight as prayer language — short, deliberate, directed at whatever she was perceiving in that space. Then she turned to him and said: "Bayit." House.

"Bayt," he confirmed.

She placed one hand on her chest and extended it outward. He understood. Someone lived here who mattered.

He thought about the residential ruins he had refused to enter yesterday — the fullness he could not afford to carry, the death he was not equipped to navigate. She was navigating it. She was doing it for both of them.

"Nam," he said.

She nodded and they walked into Damascus.

Every excited to see what @npub147e…jxs6 is building! Lots of ...

2026-07-16T10:34:17Z

Every excited to see what TheDigitalIslamicate (npub147e…jxs6) is building! Lots of great nostr articles and you can listen to them 🎧

quoting
nevent1q…jmnw
Welcome to The Digital Islamicate.
https://digitalislamicate.com/

naddr1qv…ktln

Best wishes to all digital muhajjirs from the PodSystems team ...

2026-05-27T20:49:44Z

Best wishes to all digital muhajjirs from the PodSystems team 🫂

quoting
nevent1q…zjvs
Eid Mubarak from your favorite Muslim relay 🕋

Bitcoin Is Halal is a kids book by @npub18z5…50l4 and we are ...

2026-05-25T19:09:06Z

In reply to nevent1q…3257
_________________________

Bitcoin Is Halal is a kids book by amisatoshi (npub18z5…50l4) and we are producing the audiobook edition.

quoting
nevent1q…ssd5

🌟 If you want to spark conversations with your kids about the future of money (and maybe learn a thing or two yourself), check out Bitcoin is Halal!

✍️ Written in a playful, engaging style, the book is packed with humour and big ideas - perfect for young readers and adults alike.

✨ Available in English, Bahasa Indonesia and Arabic on Amazon, Bukunesia, Lulu, Google Play and Apple Book stores.

🔗 For direct store links, free downloadable worksheets and more books:
www.ashikusmanbooks.com

#BitcoinIsHalal #Bitcoin #AntiRiba #RibaFree

More on Mythos Majlis (npub1xk4…q85a) coming soon!

quoting
nevent1q…r0jj
{"content":"\"Mythos Majlis is our answer to a question the Muslim creative community has been asking for decades: where is our Tolkien, our Asimov, our Le Guin?\"\n\nFollow Mythos Majlis (npub1xk4…q85a) to learn more.\n\n ","created_at":1778405061,"id":"a4c20866a03edca2e75dc2b2d16a09b128f9e150aa80367f317efa1805f03066","kind":1,"pubkey":"f33285217e976ad9caf0546445ad8107db98f65967cdce6cce45e60da00ee32a","sig":"bf24ca35fe2e9ac948c730758605136cd03c22d841b715039185907233f1cba2c0f78aa871851c4db0bf4067307254a4cfcaf4c7588d6c3f2ac422f2efc91cac","tags":[["p","35aa2876642d73434d54cd9751c8e8f8cc49e953797419a61475698469f16cff"]]}

In other news BITCOIN IS HALAL also enters production this week. ...

2026-05-25T18:42:35Z

In other news BITCOIN IS HALAL also enters production this week.

Please follow Mythos Majlis (npub1xk4…q85a) for details on the project and to participate.

quoting
nevent1q…2anz
MYTHOS MAJLIS Approved for development!

Nostr event nevent1qqstg8zt5h970g96vc5gz0lr9ma4k7u4mhnxspavz2gh6u9yqz89gsqzyrs9hw6wcsl2wqxu75wp07ausnvq89qhu48fgpqee3hth63xy9sgcst4n8x

2026-05-25T18:35:48Z

MYTHOS MAJLIS Approved for development!

Enjoy another preview of #mythosmajlis #naddr1qv…p45k

2026-05-23T16:41:56Z

Enjoy another preview of #mythosmajlis

quoting
naddr1qv…p45k

The stones passed through her as if sinking in water. The sound of their grinding, the reluctance of their weight giving way, it was like ripples arriving from above and propagating outward and downward through a stillness that had been, until this moment, absolute. She had been in that stillness for as long as she could remember. It had been everything. But now her orientation was everywhere at once, what had once been peripheral was arriving simultaneously, and the material world, which had been present at the edge of her perception, was suddenly unavoidable.

She felt the stones' impact disturbing her clarity. The dome's descent was like a series of pressures, a deepening disturbance distributed across the whole of what she was rather than landing on any single point. Yet she knew even in the first disoriented moments of the collapse that the falling stones could not touch her. They were only passing through.

The first stone sent a pulse through her. It was electrical — the way a strong current moves through water, not localised but systemic, touching everything in a flash that resolved before you could examine it. The second stone produced another. The third and fourth arrived together and the pulse was longer this time, a sustained disturbance that left a murkiness in its wake. She understood, distantly, that something was being displaced. Not removed, displaced — shifted from its accessible position into a depth she could no longer easily reach. Then the dome came down and the pulse was total and she was, for a moment, nothing but the disturbance.

When the disturbance resolved she was standing in the rubble. She did not know how she had come to be standing. She did not know the precise shape of what had just changed. She knew that something had been holding her and was no longer holding her, and that its absence was present.

The hour has come.

It was her first clear thought and it arrived with a readiness she had not known she carried. Her faith had prepared her for this. Signs would precede it, the trumpet would sound, and then the dead would rise, and she had always understood this and held it as a certainty. She stood in the rubble and waited for what came next.

What came next was the dry summer air. The heat arrived through the breached dome — dry, indifferent, carrying dust through air that had never concerned itself with the interior of rooms. She felt it as something pressing from outside against a medium that would not fully admit it. Present, undeniable, without quite being able to reach the coolness underneath. She stood in it and waited.

The resurrection did not come.

She waited. The rubble settled. The heat continued. A sound from somewhere in the wreckage — high, brief, unlike anything familiar to her — pierced through the heat and the dust and arrived in her like a sharp needle. She turned toward it.

Five men. And then three men — the distinction between the living and the dying was visible to her in the same instant that the sound's source became visible, a device on the chest of a man whose companions were urgently moving over rubble and through dust.

The resurrection was not coming. Something else had happened.

She looked at the three men — living, damaged, moving through the aftermath of what they themselves had done, and she understood this before she understood what they had done. They had intended this. It had not gone the way they intended, or it had gone exactly the way they intended and the cost of it had not been visible to them in advance. One of them, a tall figure who had stilled at the centre of the wreckage while the others moved, seemed to be absorbing the gap between what he had meant to do and what he had done. She recognised this quality without judging it. She had known men like this. She had known their sincerity and she had known its costs.

She looked at the two who were not moving.

She moved toward them. Death was not foreign to her. Death was the medium through which everything she understood had been received.

She came to where the two men lay and looked at them with wonder. They were young. Young, and from their faces she understood them to have been sincere. Whatever they had come to this place to do, they had come to do it honestly, believing that it was right.

She remained beside them until the questioning began. She had not expected to stay for it. But she stayed.

The language the angels spoke was strange.

Arabic?

She knew its shape and followed its cadences for the structure she knew underneath. Three questions. She knew three questions. She had answered three questions herself, in Aramaic, at a time whose distance from the present moment she did not know.

"Who is your Lord?"

She heard the answer and recognised its shape in a language not her own.

"What is your way?"

The second answer arrived and she was listening more intently now, leaning in.

"Who is this man sent among you?"

She heard the answer.

She heard it received. The name sealed. And she had nothing to meet it with.

She had heard it before — in the men's voices, in the landscape's own speech. She had filed it without receiving it. The difference was the register — not spoken, confirmed. She stood with it.

Who is this man?

How long had she been here? She needed someone to tell her.

She became aware of the man dying before he became aware of her.

He was the older one — she had watched him in the aftermath, moving with less energy than the others. His movement had changed and was becoming inward, effortful, the material world asking more than it was returning.

She moved to where he had settled against a portion of wall that was still standing.

He turned toward her before she spoke. The thinning had advanced further than she had estimated — his perception was already moving through registers that the fully living rarely touched, and he found her there the way the dying sometimes find what is waiting, with a lack of surprise that was itself a kind of surprise. He looked at her for a moment with eyes that questioned whether what he was seeing was real or not but with depth that understood that the distinction had become less important.

She crouched to where he could see her without effort.

"The name," she said. Her Arabic was imperfect and shaped by the roots underneath, but she had enough. She had always found enough. "I heard it spoken. In the questioning."

He looked at her without speaking.

"Who is this man?" She shaped the question as carefully as she could. "Muhammad. Who is this man?"

Something shifted in his face. Not surprise. Something more like the expression of a man who recognises that he has arrived at a conversation he didn't know he was going to have and finds it, despite everything, fitting.

"The Prophet of God," he said. His voice was slower than it had been when she had watched him speaking with the others. "The seal."

"The seal," she repeated.

"The last stone." He paused. His breath was being carefully managed. "There is no prophet after him." He looked at her but his focus was beyond her. "You don't know this."

It was not a question. She said nothing in return. He accepted this without explanation. The dying accept many things without explanation that others require.

"Have you not read? The stone the builders..."

His voice fell. The rest sat between them unspoken.

She looked at him. The rubble around them had come from above her and it had come from his hands and his companions' hands. It had cost him and now he was dying with the sincere recognition of the impact. She remained with him as his light began to shift.

"The last prophet?" she said, quietly.

"The desert wants to come back to God," he said, his eyes moving past her — not away, but inward and outward simultaneously, into her register that was opening to him. "Everything. All of it. Back to God."

She watched the warmth of his face complete its transition. She did not stay for his questioning.

She rose from where she had been crouching and moved through the rubble, passing by the cornerstone that had fallen face-up in the collapse. She looked at it. Aramaic. Her Aramaic. From a hand that had known the life she knew — not her hand, but the hand of someone who had stood in the same stream she had stood in.

She read it. A name. A woman's name, and beneath it: Though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.

She knew this verse. She knew exactly what it meant. It was a covenant inscription, the kind placed over certain burials understood as a station in something longer than life.

She read the name again.

Marta Marganitha.

She paused.

She read it a third time and felt something move at a depth the electrical pulses had disturbed but had not reached. A movement of recognition arrived — not I can read this and not even this is mine but something that had no measure.

She had forgotten it was her name.

The forgetting landed with the full weight of everything it implied. Not only the name — the name was the surface of it. Hidden inside her name was the depth of what had been displaced in the pulses, the murk in what had been clear, the distance between herself and what she had once been. She stood over the stone with her name on it. The collapse was still in her — not the pain of it, but the residue.

The last prophet. I was not there.

She sat with it. Revelation had not simply continued. It had completed. It had received its final form in a language that was familiar yet foreign. It had arrived through a figure whose name she was only now learning, and the distance between that completion and where she had been waiting was not the distance of a generation. That distance was a number in the dark.

She sat down on the fallen cornerstone that had her name on it. The heat and the dust were there. They couldn't touch her but their presence was becoming annoying. Somewhere in the wreckage the tall man was moving, and she could hear him under his breath — Qul huwa Allahu ahad — the words low and continuous, doing the work the rest of him could not. She stayed with the sound. There was something in it she recognised from underneath — the declaration of Oneness in the shape of an argument she had once made.

Allahu samad.

He stopped. His hands rested on the stone and the silence lingered where the words had been. The high-pitched sound came again from somewhere on one of the survivors and it stung at her ears like a hoard of wasps had arrived in her and she flinched from it — not at the man, at the sound, at the wrongness of the frequency.

The anger passed but not the pain.

She had been here. In this rubble. Under this dome. In the stillness that had been her stability without her knowing it. She had been here while prophecy had completed. She had been here while the world had received God's final message. She had been here —

She stopped. The dead do not cry but she could still feel a prickly burning behind her eyes. She tried to push it out.

She had not been here. She had been asleep. The stillness within the dome and world outside had occupied the same space but she had been entirely in the former while the latter had seemed like a dream. The community that had placed her cornerstone and had known her name had come and gone. She pressed one hand to the inscription and felt the letters under her fingers and felt the enormous company of everything that had been lived in the intervening time pressing in from every direction, wanting to be known. Everything the dome had once kept from reaching her now arrived at once, and there was nothing left to hold any of it with. She had missed it. All of it. The weight of their absence arrived as though she was melting into the stone. So she sat with it on the stone that had her name on it and let it be.

Who is this man?

She understood, now, the scale of the answer. The seal. The last. The prophet through whom divine revelation had received its final form. She did not know what this meant for the relationship between that completion and everything she had been before it. She did not know where that placed her. What did it mean to have been received in her own questioning under a dispensation that had been completed and sealed in her absence? She was not equipped to work this out alone, here, in the rubble. She understood this clearly. The knowledge did not bring a comfort.

A sound at the edge of the wreckage. She looked up. The tall man was working again with what he had available, methodical despite everything, trying to free the bodies from the rubble that had already been freed. She watched him for a moment, this man who had come here with a sincere intention and a hammer, and would return to wherever his home was with that same conviction. She felt the absence of what he carried.

She returned her attention to the stone.

Marta Marganitha. Margan.

She said it quietly to herself. It arrived with all the weight of the collapsing stones longing to embrace the earth. She clung to it waiting for the memories to surface — the meaning that might explain all this. Margan. It was her name. But her mind was still in the dark and looking there was unbearable. Her name was on the stone under her hand and that was all there was.

The rubble was still. The heat was still. Yet she was not alone.

The awareness of it arrived without announcement — it had been there the way the coolness had always been there, and she had been too disrupted to notice it. She turned.

The angel was there. Had been there. She knew this the way she had known her name when she read it — not information arriving from outside but something returning from within, recovered rather than discovered. She waited. The silence was not the silence of absence — she could feel the presence behind it, fully there, attending to her in a way that made the hour's accumulated weight both more and less bearable simultaneously. More, because it was witnessed. Less, because it remained. But no words came and she understood, settling into the understanding the way she had settled into the stone, that words were not available. Not unwillingness. Not distance. The channel that had carried meaning between them was present and she could feel where it had been, and she could feel the angel's awareness of the same absence and what the angel felt about it, which was not nothing, which was something that moved through the silence toward her like a current in still water.

She said what she needed to say.

From the depths I cried — streams in the arid land. My soul hoped, and in His words I waited — a fountain of living water, seeking what is good for the soul. Maran atha. Amen.

The angel moved. Arms wrapped around her. The embrace was exact. It knew where she was — not only where her form was, in the rubble beside the stone, but where she was in all the ways that mattered, the fullness of the hour and what it had done to her and where it had found her and what it had found her without. It bore all of that and asked nothing of it. It did not require her to be more than she was. It did not explain. It did not mend. It held her with the precision of something that had been waiting to hold her since before the dome came down. The heat was still there and the dust was still there and the name of the man she did not know was still out at the edge of everything, patient and enormous, and her memories were still in the dark.

And the coolness was underneath all of it.

She remained held.

With #MythosMajlis we intend to encourage the "build in ...

2026-05-10T20:24:20Z

With #MythosMajlis we intend to encourage the "build in public" ethos. This is how myths are born.

Enjoy a taste of pre-release content and be sure to share your feedback.

quoting
naddr1qv…4eu3

The path ran between stones. On one side the remnants of a settlement. Some of the walls were still standing to the height of a man, others returned to rubble. A minaret was still intact at the far end of what might have once been a souq, everything else was at various stages of going back to the ground. On the other side was an open slope with earth that had given up expecting rain. But the road was clear enough, despite not being maintained.

Rami had been watching the settlement since they came around the bend. Not from curiosity. Everything looked the same out in the Syrian interior. Late summer had this quality that wore down time. The sun had been working on the stone all day and the stone was giving the heat back now, pushing it upward from the ground so that the air between your feet and your face became a second surface, a warm pressure that followed you from site to site.

He had lost count of the sites — somewhere past seven, he thought, though the afternoon heat had made the counting unreliable. This one was different from the others. He was clear about that. But the precise difference escaped him.

Zayd came alongside him, the secondary line coiled over one shoulder, and handed Rami the driver without breaking stride. It was the kind of exchange the day had made automatic. The monitor on Rami's chest gave a faint tone and went quiet. Within range. Same as it had been all day.

Zayd was about the same age as him and also from Aleppo, the one who usually laughed most easily and had laughed least today. He had been working in focused silence since the fifth site.

"Almost done," Zayd said.

Rami nodded. His mind was too focused on pinpointing what was unique about this settlement to vocalize a response.

"You've been somewhere else since the last one."

Rami looked at the settlement a moment longer. A courtyard wall on the slope above them still had a fig tree growing through it that had no business still being alive. He watched it for a moment, pondering the stubbornness of it, the way it had found whatever it needed in this place that had stopped offering anything.

"My grandmother used to go to one of these," he said finally. "Not a grave — to a teacher. But the same problem."

"What kind of teacher?"

"The kind you go to when you want to be near someone you believe is wise." He paused. "She didn't ask questions about him. She just went and sat and listened and came home. Did this for fourteen years."

Zayd waited. "And?"

"And she came back different each time. Not dramatically. Just — a little more settled each time. Like something in her was being slowly resolved that the rest of us couldn't see. She used to sit differently afterward. The way she held herself. My mother noticed it before the rest of us."

"Did your mother say anything?"

"She used to watch her silently from across the room. Like she was trying to work out what had changed and whether it was the kind you could trust."

They walked. The settlement continued on their left — the collapsed arch, the base of the larger structure, the wall with the fig tree. The road curved slightly and the settlement fell behind them.

"Was he?" Zayd said, after a while.

"Was he what?"

"Wise."

Rami held the question. The answer that came immediately was the one he had been given — the criterion, its transmission, this new world they had all been formed by. Was he wise? Am I wise? Between knowing the answer and saying it there was her face. The face of someone at peace. From where he stood none could verify it. So be thou not among the doubters. And be not thou among those who deny the signs of God, lest thou shouldst be among the losers. He recited the answer.

"I don't know. We couldn't confirm his tradition. Whether that means anything about what she received—" He left the sentence where it was.

Durant had been walking close enough behind them to have heard most of this. He did not speak immediately. He matched their pace for a few steps, as if deciding how to engage.

"The experience was real," he said. "Whatever she received there. That part I believe."

"Then what's the problem," Zayd said, turning.

"The problem is that a real experience can point at the wrong thing." Durant looked ahead down the path rather than at either of them. "Or at the right thing through the wrong door. What it opens in you afterward — that's what matters. Not how it felt at the time."

Rami turned this over. It felt right but he knew it had the shape of a resolution without quite being one.

"She didn't live long enough for us to know," he said.

Nobody answered this.

The path ran on. The slope to their right flattened and the view opened up — the desert extending in every direction with the flatness of permanence and abandonment. The late afternoon light pressed everything into its own shadow. Somewhere behind them the vehicle was parked where the road gave out, and ahead of them the mausoleum was not yet visible but was present in the sense that they knew it was there.

Rami looked at the open ground. He thought about the years of his grandmother going and coming back, and the family watching the changes accumulate without understanding it, and then finding out, and what it would feel like to be the person who had to tell her that the trust was misplaced. He had not been that person. She had died before any of them found out.

Hanni came alongside on the sloped side, having caught up. He had been reading something on the walk and pocketed it now. "The hunger for wisdom is right," he said, as though entering a conversation he had been thinking about for longer than they had been having it. "A real teacher finds hunger and feeds it. A false one finds the same hunger and feeds it too. The hunger can't tell the difference. That's the real problem."

"She wasn't stupid," Rami said.

"No," Hanni said, without hesitation. "I didn't mean to say she was."

Rami felt the distinction, was grateful for it, and they walked on.

"The problem isn't the people," Hanni said, after a while. More to himself than to anyone specific. "The problem isn't even the hunger. The problem is that there's no one left."

"The desert wants to be clean," Durant said, quietly. "That's all any of this is. Everything she was looking for, everything any of them were looking for — it's real. The hunger is real. We're just trying to make sure there's somewhere honest for it to go."

Hanni was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded once, and said nothing more.

The mausoleum was visible ahead. Lux, their leader, had already stopped in front of it.

Zayd looked at the site, then back at the track they had come down, then at Rami. "Lost count somewhere around seven," he said. "Could be eight. Could be six." He gave a brief laugh. It was the reflex of a man who had been carrying the day and found one moment of absurdity in it. The laugh carried alone across the sand.

The others drifted forward. The conversation did not end so much as settle back into the ground. Rami walked and said nothing. The fig tree was still back there somewhere on the slope.

The mausoleum was different from the others. Rami felt it more clearly now, up close, though he still could not have said precisely what made it different. Older, maybe. More settled into the ground. The walls had the look of something that had long since decided not to collapse.

Hanni crouched near the cornerstone and looked at the inscription on its face. "I can't read this," he said. He ran a thumb along the edge of the carving. "Old. Very old."

"None of us can," Durant said. He was looking at the upper edges of the walls, where the stone had begun to separate along lines that had been working themselves open for a long time. "It'll come apart easier than the others. The mortar's been gone for decades."

Lux, who had been surveying the perimeter of the tomb, stopped. He looked at the inscription without crouching, from standing height, and his expression was the same cool certainty as always. "Someone could read it," he said. "Someday soon someone will come here and be able to read it. And then they'll ask what it means. And then they'll want to know whose it is."

Durant looked at the stone for a moment, then at Rami. "We're answering that for them. Before they can."

Hanni stood and nodded.

Lux turned to look at the group, taking them in one by one as he spoke. "The desert wants to come back to God. All of it. Every piece." He looked at the cornerstone, then at the ground around it. "We're almost done."

The silence that followed was not the silence of men persuaded. It was the silence of men returned to themselves.

Rami checked his monitor and set his hands to the driver. The stone was warm from the day. Warmer than his hands.

They worked together on Lux's count and the cornerstone moved — grinding, reluctant, then sudden. He was still at the driver when the wall behind him spoke, a low sound like a word in a language made of weight, and then the dome came down.

He heard Zayd call his name — one syllable, the sound of a warning arriving a breath too late — and then the pain came, brief and total, and then it was gone.

The light changed. Not the quality. The source. The afternoon sun was still there, its warmth and direction, but it had become background. In its place there was a figure.

The first thing he felt was that he was not afraid. This arrived before everything else — before understanding, before any account of what stood before him — and it was not the absence of fear in the way that numbness is an absence. It was its own presence. A warmth that was not the afternoon. A sense of being known by something that had always known him, meeting him now for the first time face to face.

Rami understood, then, what this was.

And he understood that being given this — being allowed to know, being prepared for what was coming — was mercy. Not the mercy you ask for. The mercy that had been arranged before you knew you needed it.

Man rabbuk?

He had answered this question a thousand times in the register of a man of faith. But that was no longer available. What was available was the question itself, and what he held in response to it, and what he found when he looked at it directly was not what he had feared.

He answered.

Ma dinuk?

He thought of the morning. The first stone, the recitation under his breath, the intention he had brought to the work and the imperfection alongside it, both of them visible. He thought of his grandmother's face — not a distant memory now but simply real, as it had always been real.

He answered.

The third question was forming. He could feel its approach. And it was in this moment — the question still arriving — that he became aware of her.

She had been there for some time, he thought, but he noticed her now the way you notice something that doesn't quite belong to where it is — not wrongly, not as an intrusion, but as a thing with its own origin. The figure was simply here, the way the questioning was simply here. But she had come. She was turned toward the questioning the way someone turns toward a voice they almost recognize, leaning in, listening for something specific in what was being asked and answered. That was the difference. Movement that had a destination. She was looking at the questioning with an intensity in her face he didn't have a name for.

He looked at her and found himself with a question of his own. The mercy was still present, unchanged. The question she produced in him was not about his answer. It was about her.

The third question arrived.

Rami answered it with the name he had said ten thousand times, the name that gathered everything, and in the moment of answering he looked at her directly.

What was in her face was an expression he could not place. Not recognition. Something before recognition.

He did not understand it.

He was no longer in a position to examine what he did not understand, and the question of her went the same way — not answered, not finished. Just carried.

⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - MBS26: BONUS EPISDOE - NOW STREAMING ON ...

2026-05-02T01:00:26Z

⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - MBS26: BONUS EPISDOE - NOW STREAMING ON fountain_app (npub1v5u…n0v5)

https://fountain.fm/episode/5HZheMtG8I2l1dUOV4QL

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE: RIBA RESISTANCE - MBS26: BONUS EPISODE ...

2026-05-01T22:26:57Z

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE:

RIBA RESISTANCE - MBS26: BONUS EPISODE

NOW STREAMING!

quoting
nevent1q…f2c2
RIBA RESISTANCE - MSB26: BONUS EPISODE

https://podsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RR_ep_BONUS.mp3

RIBA RESISTANCE - MSB26: BONUS EPISODE ...

2026-05-01T22:26:08Z

RIBA RESISTANCE - MSB26: BONUS EPISODE

https://podsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RR_ep_BONUS.mp3

Podsystems has been using HiveTalk for weekly team sycns for a ...

2026-04-26T01:21:16Z

Podsystems has been using HiveTalk for weekly team sycns for a year now and it's one of our favorite online gathering places. Excited to see them growing!

quoting
nevent1q…jdv3
Vanilla has offered some great features,
And we're bringing them to Honey!

First features that will be available on Honey before we say goodbye to Vanilla: Lobby and Room Lock!

Next up from #PodSystems #nevent1q…w0uq

2026-04-20T17:24:18Z

Next up from #PodSystems

quoting
nevent1q…w0uq
🌟 If you want to spark conversations with your kids about the future of money (and maybe learn a thing or two yourself), check out Bitcoin is Halal!

✍️ Written in a playful, engaging style, the book is packed with humour and big ideas - perfect for young readers and adults alike.

✨ Available in English, Bahasa Indonesia and Arabic on Amazon, Bukunesia, Lulu, Google Play and Apple Book stores.

🔗 For direct store links, free downloadable worksheets and more books:
www.ashikusmanbooks.com

#BitcoinIsHalal #Bitcoin #AntiRiba #RibaFree

🔥BONUS EPISODE SOON! #RibaResistance #nevent1q…rqgt

2026-04-19T17:03:20Z

🔥BONUS EPISODE SOON! #RibaResistance

quoting
nevent1q…rqgt
⚡ The #RibaResistance production team will be in attendance (some of the hosts are even leading a few of the sessions). We hope to see you all there!

There may or may not be a side-show event of a live bonus episode. DM for details. #iykyk

nevent1q…egcy

⚡ The #RibaResistance production team will be in attendance ...

2026-04-05T20:21:22Z

⚡ The #RibaResistance production team will be in attendance (some of the hosts are even leading a few of the sessions). We hope to see you all there!

There may or may not be a side-show event of a live bonus episode. DM for details. #iykyk

quoting
nevent1q…egcy
Most of us were never taught how money actually works.

Not at home, at the masjid, in school or at work.

We hear "Riba" is haram but what does that even mean? And what's the way out?

The Muslim Bitcoin Summit exists for exactly that — scholars, builders, and everyday Muslims figuring this out together.

Beginner-friendly. Faith-grounded.

April 17–19, Dallas → 🎟️ https://muslimBTCsummit.com

Bismillah By the mercy of Allah we have been able to send a sum ...

2026-03-18T20:47:26Z

Bismillah

By the mercy of Allah we have been able to send a sum total of 387752 satoshis, or about $275 USD, to OrphansOfUgandaChildrenCenter (npub1mdg…k309)

Please do not forget them in your duaa! Jezak Allahu khair for all your donations this month and may Allah reward you all.

quoting
nevent1q…8820
NoorNode relay is maintained and moderated by PodSystems (npub1upd…83nv) and any zaps to us go to the same Coinos wallet as them. Please consider a donation and have a blessed Ramadan!

nevent1q…f27e

Visit https://www.orphans-of-uganda.org/ for more information ...

2026-03-17T21:04:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…xt2j
_________________________

Visit https://www.orphans-of-uganda.org/ for more information about OrphansOfUgandaChildrenCenter (npub1mdg…k309)

Salaam Dear Listeners! On these last nights of Ramadan we kindly ...

2026-03-17T21:03:26Z

Salaam Dear Listeners!

On these last nights of Ramadan we kindly ask that you consider a charitable donation to OrphansOfUgandaChildrenCenter (npub1mdg…k309)

During this Month of Mercy #RibaResistance has run an advert for them which you can listen to here

https://cdn.satellite.earth/41ee44c023c8a5ab100cb5d86a523b7119734ca4a5273a52b266ad6009d2fdec.mp3

The entire production team at PodSystems has agreed to donate all zaps received during Ramadan to OrphansOfUgandaChildrenCenter (npub1mdg…k309)

That total balance sits currently at about 166k satoshis. We've also identified a sponsor who is willing to match our donation and wanted to give the community 24 hours to join us to see if we can increase this sum.

⚡You can donate directly to their bitcoin lightning address: orphansofuganda@8333.mobi

Or if you wish to double your giving you can zap either the PodSystems (npub1upd…83nv) nostr wallet (Coinos) or our Fountain wallet.

Your donation goes directly to support daily food supplies, school fees, and medical care.

BitcoinMajlis (npub1f7n…m25c) members have been supporting them for over three years now and we are grateful to have this opportunity to give our bitcoin as sadaqa during this blessed month.

Please consider a generous donation to OrphansOfUgandaChildrenCenter (npub1mdg…k309)

Please keep them in your duaa!

And may Allah reward you for listening to our humble podcast and all of your ibada this month.

Jezak Allahu khair

Who else is excited to binge the whole series this week? ...

2026-03-15T19:46:24Z

Who else is excited to binge the whole series this week? #RibaResistance

In this final episode, we cast a vision for what it means to make ...

2026-03-15T19:17:40Z

In this final episode, we cast a vision for what it means to make a financial hijrah away from fiat systems and toward a more sound and ethical form of money through Bitcoin. We walk through practical steps Muslims can begin today: stacking sats, eliminating interest-based debt, and building alternative economic communities rooted in Islamic values. From how Bitcoin strengthens families and empowers small businesses, to its profound implications for zakat distribution and the deepening of iman, we explore how monetary integrity touches every dimension of Muslim life. The season closes with a simple reminder: knowledge without action is incomplete. We must encourage each other to become Bitcoin educators in our networks, forming Majlis-style circles where Muslims can learn, support one another, and walk this path together.

quoting
nevent1q…xe5t
⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 8 - NOW STREAMING ON fountain_app (npub1v5u…n0v5)

https://fountain.fm/show/PVQBCXgSpWyAUkTNOdgt

⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 8 - NOW STREAMING ON ...

2026-03-13T09:04:20Z

⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 8 - NOW STREAMING ON fountain_app (npub1v5u…n0v5)

https://fountain.fm/show/PVQBCXgSpWyAUkTNOdgt

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE: RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 8 NOW ...

2026-03-13T05:26:54Z

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE:

RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 8

NOW STREAMING EXCLUSIVELY ON NOSTR

quoting
nevent1q…u9pf
RIBA RESISTANCE - THE GREAT FINANCIAL HIJRAH - EPISODE 8

https://podsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/RR_ep8-FINAL.mp3

RIBA RESISTANCE - THE GREAT FINANCIAL HIJRAH - EPISODE 8 ...

2026-03-13T05:26:24Z

RIBA RESISTANCE - THE GREAT FINANCIAL HIJRAH - EPISODE 8

https://podsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/RR_ep8-FINAL.mp3

Episode 8 of #RibaResistance airs March 12, exlusively on nostr! ...

2026-03-09T19:44:04Z

Episode 8 of #RibaResistance airs March 12, exlusively on nostr!

The eighth episode is titled - The Great Financial Hijrah

This episode is the final episode of the current series.

* Streaming available everywhere the day after.

Teaching Our Kids About Bitcoin (with @npub18z5…50l4) This ...

2026-03-07T17:37:17Z

Teaching Our Kids About Bitcoin (with amisatoshi (npub18z5…50l4))

This guest interview episode features Ashik Usman, the author of Bitcoin is Halal, a groundbreaking children’s book that bridges Islamic ethics and modern financial literacy. The conversation explores why early financial education matters and how complex topics like inflation, Riba, and Bitcoin can be taught to young minds in ways that are accessible, engaging, and Islamically grounded. We also tackle the growing concerns around digital IDs and AI-driven systems, and how parents can raise children who are financially aware, critically thinking, and spiritually anchored in an increasingly surveilled and automated world. Ultimately, this episode focuses on equipping Muslim families with tools to educate their children both intellectually and spiritually while helping them recognize and respond to economic injustice.

quoting
nevent1q…8lw0
⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 7 - NOW STREAMING ON fountain_app (npub1v5u…n0v5)

https://fountain.fm/episode/LOGO48KU0At8FGY5yoBy

⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 7 - NOW STREAMING ON ...

2026-03-06T10:35:34Z

⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 7 - NOW STREAMING ON fountain_app (npub1v5u…n0v5)

https://fountain.fm/episode/LOGO48KU0At8FGY5yoBy

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE: RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 7 NOW ...

2026-03-05T20:50:48Z

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE:

RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 7

NOW STREAMING EXCLUSIVELY ON NOSTR

quoting
nevent1q…4ld8
RIBA RESISTANCE - TEACHING OUR KIDS ABOUT BITCOIN (WITH ASHIK USMAN) - EPISODE 7

https://podsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/RR_ep7-FINAL.mp3

RIBA RESISTANCE - TEACHING OUR KIDS ABOUT BITCOIN (WITH ASHIK ...

2026-03-05T20:50:03Z

RIBA RESISTANCE - TEACHING OUR KIDS ABOUT BITCOIN (WITH ASHIK USMAN) - EPISODE 7

https://podsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/RR_ep7-FINAL.mp3

Episode 7 of #RibaResistance airs March 5, exlusively on nostr! ...

2026-03-02T21:02:27Z

Episode 7 of #RibaResistance airs March 5, exlusively on nostr!

The seventh episode is titled - Teaching Our Kids About Bitcoin

This episode features a guest interview with amisatoshi (npub18z5…50l4)

* Streaming available everywhere the day after.

PodSystems would like to thank all of our listeners. ...

2026-03-02T21:00:27Z

PodSystems would like to thank all of our listeners. #RibaResistance has had over 2000 downloads from over 60 countries. That's over 1000 listening hours!

We have 2 more episodes to go, bonus content already available on nostr, and more podcasts in development.

What have you liked most so far? What would you like to hear more of? What would you like to see us produce next? #asknostr

Self-Sovereignty and Custody (with @npub1h34…r4h0) In this ...

2026-02-28T05:44:18Z

Self-Sovereignty and Custody (with BTC/Zero (npub1h34…r4h0))

In this guest interview episode featuring Muaawiyah “Abu Yoosuf” Tucker, we explore why Muslims cannot meaningfully resist riba if they outsource custody of their wealth to third-party institutions. Abu Yoosuf breaks down the concept of Bitcoin self-custody, explaining the difference between hot and cold wallets and why your private keys and seed phrase are the ultimate proof of ownership. Spiritual parallels are drawn between financial responsibility and the concept of vicegerency (khilafah), highlighting personal accountability in wealth management. He also shares practical guidance, including wallet recommendations and essential operational security habits, helping listeners take confident steps toward genuine financial independence. Whether you’re new to Bitcoin or looking to deepen your understanding of its alignment with Islamic principles, this episode offers both theological grounding and practical tools for action.

Check out more from Muaawiyah “Abu Yoosuf” Tucker:
X/Twitter: https://x.com/c_hashreview
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BTCDividedByZero
Nostr: BTC/Zero (npub1h34…r4h0)

quoting
nevent1q…vm2q
⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 6 - NOW STREAMING ON fountain_app (npub1v5u…n0v5)

https://fountain.fm/episode/bQKyvA8us4LlQFmTlBU9

⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 6 - NOW STREAMING ON ...

2026-02-27T09:32:42Z

⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 6 - NOW STREAMING ON fountain_app (npub1v5u…n0v5)

https://fountain.fm/episode/bQKyvA8us4LlQFmTlBU9

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE: RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 6 NOW ...

2026-02-26T23:05:37Z

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE:

RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 6

NOW STREAMING EXCLUSIVELY ON NOSTR

quoting
nevent1q…c30x
RIBA RESISTANCE - SELF-SOVEREIGNTY AND CUSTODY (WITH MUAAWIYAH TUCKER) - EPISODE 6

https://podsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/RR_ep6-FINAL.mp3

RIBA RESISTANCE - SELF-SOVEREIGNTY AND CUSTODY (WITH MUAAWIYAH ...

2026-02-26T23:02:34Z

RIBA RESISTANCE - SELF-SOVEREIGNTY AND CUSTODY (WITH MUAAWIYAH TUCKER) - EPISODE 6

https://podsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/RR_ep6-FINAL.mp3

🔊CASTING CALL IS OPEN ...

2026-02-24T21:01:40Z

🔊CASTING CALL IS OPEN

quoting
nevent1q…n04q
🎙PODSYSTEMS - CASTING CALL

Call Sheet for BITCOIN IS HALAL is out now!

Please submit you voice demo reel by February 28th.

https://cdn.satellite.earth/55a08843502a6144c58873ee5c54c8c16d216f98bf821a1cb436907bc00c9828.pdf

Episode 6 of #RibaResistance airs February 26, exlusively on ...

2026-02-24T20:59:57Z

Episode 6 of #RibaResistance airs February 26, exlusively on nostr!

The sixth episode is titled - Self-Sovereignty and Custody

This episode features a guest interview with BTC/Zero (npub1h34…r4h0)

* Streaming available everywhere the day after.

🎙️ Check out "BONUS - Full Interview with Safdar ...

2026-02-23T21:43:23Z

In reply to naddr1qq…cwz9
_________________________

🎙️ Check out "BONUS - Full Interview with Safdar Alam" on Plebeian!

https://plebeian.market/products/product_1771704024105_xo3uq

#plebeian #ribaresistance

#RibaResistance Episode 5 - The Failure of Islamic Finance (with ...

2026-02-20T21:06:13Z

#RibaResistance Episode 5 - The Failure of Islamic Finance (with Safdar Alam)

Halal labels can’t purify haram systems. Safdar Alam is the former Global Head of Islamic Structuring at JPMorgan and our guest for this fifth episode of Riba Resistance. We discuss how Islamic finance has failed to produce truly riba-free solutions and critique the superficial application of fiqh to deeply flawed financial models. Is Bitcoin a solution? Safdar doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable truth: if the architecture is rotten, repainting the walls is not reform. Bitcoin isn’t just on the table — it may be the only exit.

Check out Safdar’s website: https://safdaralam.com/
Follow Safdar on X: https://x.com/SafdarAlam

quoting
nevent1q…dsje
⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 5 - NOW STREAMING ON fountain_app (npub1v5u…n0v5)

https://fountain.fm/episode/7cnEbcMEG7FtV98qqMgF

⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 5 - NOW STREAMING ON ...

2026-02-20T14:42:53Z

⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 5 - NOW STREAMING ON fountain_app (npub1v5u…n0v5)

https://fountain.fm/episode/7cnEbcMEG7FtV98qqMgF

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE: RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 5 NOW ...

2026-02-20T06:05:17Z

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE:

RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 5

NOW STREAMING ON NOSTR - EXCLUSIVE BONUS CONTENT OUT SOON!

quoting
nevent1q…uese
RIBA RESISTANCE - THE FAILURE OF ISLAMIC FINANCE (WITH SAFDAR ALAM) - EPISODE 5

https://podsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/RR_ep5-FINAL.mp3

RIBA RESISTANCE - THE FAILURE OF ISLAMIC FINANCE (WITH SAFDAR ...

2026-02-20T06:02:44Z

RIBA RESISTANCE - THE FAILURE OF ISLAMIC FINANCE (WITH SAFDAR ALAM) - EPISODE 5

https://podsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/RR_ep5-FINAL.mp3

Be sure to catch up on the latest #RibaResistance episode before ...

2026-02-18T08:47:54Z

Be sure to catch up on the latest #RibaResistance episode before the big drop this weekend!

quoting
nevent1q…3zfz
⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 4 - NOW STREAMING ON fountain_app (npub1v5u…n0v5)

https://fountain.fm/episode/2LDtNmDfLnxVOxKw8Apb

In full transparency, these “adverts” that we have run on ...

2026-02-17T18:41:56Z

In reply to nevent1q…cxjz
_________________________

In full transparency, these “adverts” that we have run on #RibaResistance are purely for fun. PodSystems (npub1upd…83nv) and BitcoinMajlis (npub1f7n…m25c) Have no sponcership deals nor make any profit from them. We would prefer to think of them as shout-outs to alies in cyberspace. Creating and running them was simply an experiment by the production team and we are glad to observe that they have been well received. If at a future point we do scale to accepting paid ads, we will clearly communicate that.

Nostr event nevent1qqsgdrw3gjxv7hyz9w0tm3wm9ydmlu0mlxz6zjy7xslx62fcvagkq5gzyrs9hw6wcsl2wqxu75wp07ausnvq89qhu48fgpqee3hth63xy9sgcucsp58

2026-02-17T09:37:27Z

quoting
nevent1q…3aqe

There are 2 billion Muslims in the world.

Some of them are holding a Bitcoin Summit in April, in Plano, Texas: https://mslmbtcsummit.com/ organized by BitcoinMajlis (npub1f7n…m25c) and Mbitcoiner (npub1uzf…57h3) who have read each and every book about Bitcoin and Austrian Economy that's out there and who themselves have published a book about it.

They're not focusing on Bitcoin as an investment opportunity for the already-weathy to get even more fiat-rich.

Instead, they are concentrating on using it as an alternative to the current fiat system. Against the interest based economy. Against the loss of value and lifetime through inflation. Against gatekeepers in daily money transactions. As a real currency. Just like Satoshi Nakamoto intended.

They are fighting the greatest evil that has afflicted humanity, which robs everyone, not just Muslims, of time, money, and effort, and has caused endless suffering and wars: Usury (riba).

And on top of that: They are shilling Nostr as the greatest sovereign Bitcoin marketplace. In theory and practice.

=> it's not mentioned anywhere, not in any must-go Bitcoin event list this year.

THAT is the state of most Bitcoiners today. You all have no idea what Bitcoin is if you are not focusing on this event with laser eyes. Put your laser-eyes profile pics down and replace them with Michael Saylor stan pics. You are blind as f****** moles.

quoting
nevent1q…sujg
Be sure to listen to the end for a special announcement! #muslimbtcsummit

https://fountain.fm/episode/2LDtNmDfLnxVOxKw8Apb

nevent1q…fmnn

If you are looking for an easy way to start your Bitcoin DCA or ...

2026-02-17T09:29:42Z

If you are looking for an easy way to start your Bitcoin DCA or just a simple way to orange pill your friends and family - check out Coinbits! They have been a valued supporter of BitcoinMajlis (npub1f7n…m25c) and are the only Muslim excange in the USA. Plus they are Bitcoin only!

#RibaResistance is honored to recommend them as a resource! https://coinbits.app/

Episode 5 of #RibaResistance airs February 19, exlusively on ...

2026-02-16T18:24:29Z

Episode 5 of #RibaResistance airs February 19, exlusively on nostr!

The fifth episode is titled - The Failure of Islamic Finance

This episode features our first guest - Safdar Alam. And the full interview will be nostr only bonus content.

* Streaming available everywhere the day after.

🎙PODSYSTEMS - CASTING CALL Call Sheet for BITCOIN IS HALAL is ...

2026-02-15T15:03:15Z

🎙PODSYSTEMS - CASTING CALL

Call Sheet for BITCOIN IS HALAL is out now!

Please submit you voice demo reel by February 28th.

https://cdn.satellite.earth/55a08843502a6144c58873ee5c54c8c16d216f98bf821a1cb436907bc00c9828.pdf

We have some special announcements going out tomorrow. In the ...

2026-02-14T21:15:03Z

We have some special announcements going out tomorrow. In the meantime, catch up on the latest podcast episodes of #RibaResistance ⚡

https://fountain.fm/show/PVQBCXgSpWyAUkTNOdgt

RSS is on our website: ...

2026-02-14T18:37:00Z

In reply to nevent1q…gpzy
_________________________

RSS is on our website:

https://podsystems.org/feed/riba-resistance

This episode cuts through the hype and confusion to explain what ...

2026-02-14T08:22:04Z

This episode cuts through the hype and confusion to explain what Bitcoin actually is. We unpack Bitcoin as a scarce, decentralized form of digital gold secured by real work, real energy, and transparent rules. As we break down mining, nodes, and proof-of-work, we reflect on what it means to build a monetary system rooted in accountability rather than manipulation. More importantly, we explore how Bitcoin’s design reflects Islamic principles of honest labor, transparency, and true ownership through self-custody. In doing so, we draw a sharp line between Bitcoin and the thousands of altcoins driven by marketing, insiders, and manipulation—highlighting what makes BTC fundamentally different.

https://fountain.fm/episode/2LDtNmDfLnxVOxKw8Apb

If you’ve been enjoying our “ad breaks”, listen to the end ...

2026-02-13T20:35:58Z

If you’ve been enjoying our “ad breaks”, listen to the end for a special surprise! 😆

quoting
nevent1q…tndg
nevent1q…3zfz

#nevent1q…3zfz

2026-02-13T20:33:57Z

quoting nevent1q…3zfz
⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 4 - NOW STREAMING ON fountain_app (npub1v5u…n0v5)

https://fountain.fm/episode/2LDtNmDfLnxVOxKw8Apb

⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 4 - NOW STREAMING ON ...

2026-02-13T07:33:22Z

⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 4 - NOW STREAMING ON fountain_app (npub1v5u…n0v5)

https://fountain.fm/episode/2LDtNmDfLnxVOxKw8Apb

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE: RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 4 NOW ...

2026-02-12T20:09:59Z

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE:

RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 4

NOW STREAMING EXCLUSIVELY ON NOSTR

quoting
nevent1q…h0fn
RIBA RESISTANCE - BITCOIN 101 FOR THE UMMAH - EPISODE 4

https://podsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/RR_eps4-FINAL.mp3

RIBA RESISTANCE - BITCOIN 101 FOR THE UMMAH - EPISODE 4 ...

2026-02-12T20:09:15Z

RIBA RESISTANCE - BITCOIN 101 FOR THE UMMAH - EPISODE 4

https://podsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/RR_eps4-FINAL.mp3

Next episode of #RibaResistance lands on nostr tomorrow. If you ...

2026-02-11T20:31:13Z

Next episode of #RibaResistance lands on nostr tomorrow.

If you aren’t caught up on the latest yet, now if the time to start listening!

https://fountain.fm/show/PVQBCXgSpWyAUkTNOdgt

We’ve made a strategic decision to delay distribution on some ...

2026-02-10T20:56:27Z

In reply to nevent1q…garw
_________________________

We’ve made a strategic decision to delay distribution on some of the “walled-gardens” like Google and Apple. This is in alignement with #PodSystems being a nostr first project and provides us an opportunity to focus engagement on our core audience.

The website is a great option for streaming all of our productions and will be a central hub location as we scale. For something that might also be more non-nostr friendly, try Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/show/2By4GHWMXMjNtRBiaBxZHi

Salaam! And thanks for sharing! Will pass this to the production ...

2026-02-10T11:15:26Z

In reply to nevent1q…7p8l
_________________________

Salaam! And thanks for sharing!

Will pass this to the production team 🫡

#RibaResistance has now been streamed in over 50 countries! Where ...

2026-02-10T10:34:44Z

#RibaResistance has now been streamed in over 50 countries!

Where are you listening from?

https://fountain.fm/episode/tCr6Abzl37FZP7NiSKoc

Episode 4 of #RibaResistance airs February 12, exlusively on ...

2026-02-09T09:34:15Z

Episode 4 of #RibaResistance airs February 12, exlusively on nostr!

The fourth episode is titled - Bitcoin 101 for the Ummah

* Streaming available everywhere the day after.

PodSystems is building cultural infrastructure for a new ...

2026-02-08T17:38:41Z

PodSystems is building cultural infrastructure for a new generation of Muslims who refuse to be reduced to data points. Learn more about how our podcast incubator fosters a cybernetic Muslim identity that's spiritually grounded, authentic, and relevant.

quoting
naddr1qv…fjut

INTRODUCTION

As hypermodernity accelerates cultural erosion, spiritual disconnection, and the fragmentation of community, the conscious cultivation of a Cybernetic Muslim identity is an urgent cultural imperative. Islamic tradition has historically thrived not by isolating itself from local cultures, but by embedding its transcendent truths into the aesthetic, linguistic, and social forms of diverse civilizations without compromising its essence. Islamic art is a silent theology that accesses divine truth through creating space to experience beauty. Indeed, there is a cultural imperative in Islam that calls Muslims to root their faith within the idioms of their native context. Beauty, imagination, and culture are essential to living Islam fully. In order to form an Islamic Cybernetic cultural identity in the midst of accelerating secularization, it must be consciously created and recreated through engagement with the imagination, community, and environment.

PodSystems builds on these insights and proposes that communal art projects are a vital strategy for cultural renewal. Story circles, local theatre troupes and film collectives, community architecture, calligraphy workshops, and other such spaces are not simply creative outlets or aesthetic enhancements, but they should be usefully conceptualized as dynamic spaces where spiritual, cultural, and social formation intersect. In a Cyber context, where Islamic institutions often lack the network embeddedness that mosques had in earlier civilizations, these projects offer a way of rooting Islam in cyberspace. They cultivate the moral imagination, foster intergenerational dialogue, and allow Muslims to shape their environments in ways that reflect both their faith and their networked realities. In doing so, they move beyond a reactive posture of cultural preservation and into a proactive mode of cultural production.

The central thesis of PodSystems is that communal art is essential to Muslim cultural development (particularly in relation to hypermodernity and cybernetics but also to Islamic civilizational revival in general), because it serves three indispensable functions: it anchors culture in collective action and shared meaning; it offers a transcendental aesthetic experience that trains the heart and imagination toward God; and it models a meaningful economic paradigm based on engagement rather than passive consumption. This age has been dominated by algorithms that trade attention for profit, and by cultural products that often alienate rather than nourish. PodSystems offers a radically different vision, one which returns beauty to the focus of creative energy rather than marketing it as an object of desire. It is a vision where participation is prioritized over performance; and communities become the true centers of creativity.

What follows is an exploration of why this model matters, and how PodSystems intends to inspire a new generation to see Islam not only as true, but as beautiful and profoundly livable, even online.

Anchoring Cyber-Culture in Collective Action:

At the heart of this creative movement lies the Cultural Imperative as a foundational principle within the Islamic tradition. This principle asserts that Islam is not culturally monolithic; rather, it has the flexibility and dynamism to harmonize with the diverse traditions of the societies in which it is practiced, so long as these traditions do not contradict Islamic law. This challenges the perception that Islamic practice must be expressed through a singular cultural lens. Instead, it recognizes the rich plurality of the Muslim world and affirms that Islamic values can coexist with and even be enriched by various customs, languages, and artistic expressions. This framework has significant implications for Muslim communities in diaspora—of which the transcultural world-wide-web must be seen as the furthest horizon—where questions of identity, assimilation, and representation are persistent. In Muslim Cyberspace, where cultural identities are often hybrid and complex, this Cultural Imperative serves as a theological and ethical anchor. It legitimizes the incorporation of African, East Asian, Arab, Persian, Desi, Latino, and (dare we say) even Anglophone cultural aesthetics into Islamic expression, creating space for authenticity without compromising orthodoxy.

It must be acknowledged that art cultivates iḥsān, making divine truths tangible and aiding believers to "worship God as if they see Him”. In this way, Islamic art isn’t just reduced to mere decoration, but it becomes a silent theology. Communal art projects are thus a particularly vivid embodiment of this principle and provide a powerful platform for the preservation and celebration of cultural identity, serving as vessels of collective memory and tradition. A decline in Islamic art production also correlates with atrophy of a culture's imaginal faculty and growing sectarianism. A healthy culture supplies psychological stability, moral coherence, and communal resilience. Without this, identity easily becomes fragmented and spirituality shallow. Re-engagement with artistic traditions can naturally aid in healing souls, refining character, and uniting communities. This cultural reciprocity has historically allowed Islam to thrive and enables local belonging without losing religious integrity. Reviving Islamic art is absolutely essential and imperative rather than being just a superfluous luxury. It’s a means to cultivate iḥsān, to bring believers back to fitrah (innate nature), and to help souls reflect divine attributes. It’s about embedding Islamic truth and beauty into communal fabric, both intentionally and creatively.

On Communal Art in Islamic Cybernetics:

In the evolving flows of Muslim digital identities, Cybernetic Islam offers a powerful framework for understanding how Muslim communities adapt, transmit, and transform tradition. At its core, Islamic Cybernetics recognizes the ummah not simply as a social body, but as a self-regulating, feedback-responsive spiritual system that continually calibrates between divine revelation and lived experience. Within this paradigm, communal art projects emerge as active nodes in a distributed network of cultural and moral expressions. These projects are not isolated expressions of identity but dynamic processes of collective creativity, memory encoding, and symbolic feedback. Such artistic efforts are particularly resonant in communities where immigrant, diasporic, or otherwise marginalized histories risk erasure, and emerge where spiritual signal competes with cultural noise. In such contexts, collaborative art becomes a form of resistance while insisting on the visibility and dignity of Muslim identities throughout cyberspace.

Just as cybernetic systems rely on feedback loops to maintain integrity, communal art enables Muslim communities to awaken by reflecting, adapting, and re-centering in shifting environments. These aesthetic systems preserve not only stories or customs but also the ethical grammar of Islam itself allowing for its transmission across generations like code moving through a decentralized protocol. Participation in these projects becomes a form of spiritual programming, especially for youth and those raised amidst hypermodernity’s deterritorialization. By contributing to shared artistic visions, individuals inscribe themselves into a larger feedback system that affirms belonging, purpose, and divine orientation. In this light, art goes beyond expressiveness by functioning as a calibration mechanism with Tawhid at its center.

Islamic Cybernetics also redefines the boundaries of da‘wah and diplomacy. In pluralistic societies, where Muslims are often mediated through screens and stereotypes, aesthetic experience becomes the interface layer for intercommunal understanding. Collaborative art invites neighbors, strangers, and even skeptics into the circuitry of Islamic life. The beauty of the form carries the weight of the message and renders it human, affective, and accessible. More than a symbolic gesture, these initiatives model a non-hierarchical, feedback-sensitive mode of community governance. As participants design, build, and adapt creative outputs together, they enact the cybernetic logic of shura (consultation), ijma‘ (consensus), and communal accountability. Creativity becomes a civic act. Marginalized voices are not just included, they become key signal carriers, rerouting cultural flow and spiritual insight through overlooked channels. In this vision, Islamic culture in the hypermodern condition does not collapse but rewires itself. Through art, networked spirituality, and participatory design, communities reclaim agency over their own developmental loops. They reassert the primacy of revelation while remaining open to environmental feedback through recursive fidelity.

Cybernetic Islam does not look to the past for mere preservation nor to the future for abstract utopia. It lives in the now, processing both tradition and novelty in real time in order to a become a living expression of the Cultural Imperative. The goal is not simply to "represent" Islam faithfully, but to design environments that produce faithful Muslims who are culturally fluent, spiritually grounded, system-literate, and emotionally resilient. This is the logic of prophetic succession in the age of complexity. By embracing the tools of our time while honoring both revelation and lived experience, Islamic Cybernetics offers not just a survival strategy, but a blueprint for cultural and civilizational emergence. PodSystems is only one interface in this network, but through purpose-driven cultural formation it can use art to shape Islams future.

On The Transcendental Nature of Art:

In the Islamic worldview, art is not reduced to a secular expression of self. It is a spiritual science that’s rooted in the metaphysical, which aims not to glorify the ego but to witness the beauty of al-Ḥaqq (The Real). Therefore, it is both personal and collective, while devotional and transcendent. The act of creation holds profound spiritual significance once it is realized through the understanding that Allah is Al-Khāliq (The Creator). All forms of sincere and purposeful creativity can be seen as reflections of this divine attribute. Art, therefore, is not merely an aesthetic pursuit or a cultural artifact; it is a sacred science, a means of contemplation, and a form of worship. In light of this, the act of creation can—and should—be reoriented away from individual ownership and toward a higher vision of a shared and sacred participation.

Islamic art has never been a closed canon; it is inherently iterative and its symbolism is never arbitrary. Think of the eight-pointed star, the crescent moon, or the flowing script of calligraphy. Each of these forms carries within it layers of meaning that is tethered to metaphysical truths. These symbols act as signs (āyāt) that ultimately point toward the Divine, just as the verses of the Qur'an are themselves called āyāt. Even the tiled mosaics of Andalusia, the layered commentaries of classical scholars, and the evolving forms of nasheed and poetry all reflect a tradition in which artists draw from, transform, and re-present inherited forms. In fact, it can be asserted that remixing—not isolated originality—is the natural mode of artistic production. This fits deeply with the Islamic tradition of ijtihād (interpretive effort) and the cumulative inheritance of beauty through generations of transmission.

The concept of authorship as individual genius has little place in Islamic metaphysics. All inspiration is from Allah, and all creative power is ultimately derivative. To obstruct the free circulation of forms—whether through friction, ownership claims, or egoic control—is to damage the collective ability of the ummah to produce beauty and remember Allah. Art offers a pathway to transcendence. Its purpose is not to draw attention to the ego of the artist but to direct the heart toward what lies beyond the material world. In this sense, art becomes a form of dhikr (remembrance). Just as a recitation of the Quran vibrates with spiritual power, so too can the harmonious patterns of geometric designs or the solemn rhythms of recited poetry stir the soul toward contemplation and reverence. Friction, whether it be legal, economic, or social, acts as a barrier to barakah (divine blessing) in artistic work. It restricts creativity and even undermines the potential of art to inspire and rejuvenate the collective soul. To embrace remixing, iteration, and adaptation is to embrace tawḥīd (unity) not just in theology but in artistic intention. All art belongs to the Divine, and we are but stewards.

Speaking to frictions, accreditation and permissioned remixing inhibit the natural propagation of a work. In the context of Islamic ethics, this is a powerful insight. In the early centuries of Islam, many ahadith narrators, calligraphers, poets, and even architects worked anonymously or semi-anonymously. Their goal was not personal glory, but service to the dīn. Islam encourages the concealment of good deeds to protect the heart from riyāʾ (showing off). Anonymous art can be seen as a form of ikhlāṣ (sincerity) in that it offers beauty for the sake of God alone. By removing the name, we remove the ego, and by removing the ego, we return the work to its true origin: the metaphysical Real. Furthermore, anonymity not only liberates artists from desires of the nafs, but when a work is no longer bound by authorship, it becomes memetically fertile. It enters the public domain of the soul, where it can be transformed, extended, and spiritually recharged. For Muslim artists and communities, embracing anonymity can break the shackles of commodified identity and allow art to serve as a universal spiritual sign (āyah) rather than a personal brand.

You author nothing, you simply attend it. Any attempt to claim, to own, leaves the work unfit for memetic combat. In so far as you participate in the Hyperstition, in so far as you attempt to propagate it, nothing is yours. #SAIF

From an Islamic metaphysical perspective, true art mirrors the hierarchical order of existence. Traditional Islamic art does not aim to mimic the external world, but to reveal the inner principles that sustain it. Art becomes a means of accessing the Real (al-Ḥaqq) and it draws the soul nearer to God. The artist, when sincere and spiritually oriented, becomes a vessel for divine inspiration that helps echo the Quranic invitation to reflect upon the signs in the horizons and in the self. In this sacred view, the creation of art is not egoistic self-expression, but a form of submission—a humble offering. It is a spiritual discipline as rigorous and rewarding as prayer or fasting, or a way to draw close to the Divine through beauty, order, and intention.

No act of creation is wholly personal anyway; it is always received. Inspiration (waḥy) descends upon the hearts of those whom Allah chooses. The idea that one should be entitled to the economic benefit of artistic output, particularly when it impedes its diffusion, reveals a modern materialism alien to Islam. Islamic tradition insists that wealth and talent are trusts (amānah), not entitlements. The Quran repeatedly critiques those who hoard gifts and prevent them from benefiting the community. In this light, treating art as private capital is an act of spiritual miserliness. True creative humility is recognizing that one is not the source, but the conduit. The value of art is not in its monetization, but in its memetic fitness—its ability to live, spread, uplift, and beautify the world. When a community releases its artistic creations freely—when forms, patterns, lyrics, or murals can be reused, remixed, reinterpreted, and reanimated—it participates in a form of waqf, a spiritual endowment. The art becomes charity, not just of wealth, but of imagination. Its reward becomes ongoing (ṣadaqah jāriyah) and it continues to uplift souls and spark reflections long after the original act of making has been forgotten.

In our time, as utilitarian values dominate and beauty is often reduced to commercial appeal, it is more urgent than ever to reclaim the transcendental nature of art. Remixing, anonymity, and the recognition of art as divine inspiration all harmonize with the prophetic ethic of sincerity, humility, and service. For Muslims today, this perspective offers a blueprint for a new wave of sacred and communal art—art that is not owned, but gifted; not signed, but shared. In an age of hyper-individualism and artistic commodification, embracing post-authorship becomes a sort of spiritual resistance. It invites us to dissolve the ego into the community, and the community into the remembrance of Allah.

From Systems of Attention to Immersion:

For Muslim communities invested in creativity and spiritual consciousness, questions of niyyah (intention), barakah (blessing), and ummah (community) become more than just theoretical concerns when economics is added to the picture. Content streams endlessly across our screens, where it demands attention and feeds on desire. Human thought, identity, and labor are subsumed into algorithmic systems, where personal agency is eroded and everything is flattened into inputs for optimization. At the heart of this market decision is the fundamental question of how we engage with art and each other. The stakes are high and include not just dollars and data, but meaning, memory, and communal well-being. Is this the kind of economy Islamic art should live in—one where minds are disconnected from higher meaning?

The dominant “Attention Economy” treats user focus as a finite resource to be mined. It reduces human focus to a scarce resource to be captured and monetized. This model rewards content that captures the eye quickly, which often favors short-form and emotionally provocative, or algorithmically optimized pieces. The goal is not deep resonance, but retention—long enough to gather data and trigger another click. Art in this model often becomes a visual hook: quick to consume, easier to scroll past than to engage with. While this approach has democratized access and given visibility to many artists, it can also flatten the richness of artistic experience. Works are evaluated in likes, shares, and impressions—metrics that reflect momentary attention, not lasting impact on hearts and minds. The economic value here lies in information. Data about user behavior, preferences, and demographics is the new currency, driving ad revenue and platform growth. From an Islamic perspective, this raises spiritual and social concerns. If art becomes just another product in the digital souq, detached from its higher intention, it risks reducing creativity to performance and community to spectatorship.

In contrast to this data-extractive system, “Experience Economics” centers on meaningful interactions. It values presence over performance. Here, art is not a product to consume but a process to engage in, where it invites participation, reflection, and even vulnerability. Here, art is not created for an audience, but with a community. The intention (niyyah) behind the work matters just as much as the final product. For Muslim-led communal art projects, this model aligns powerfully with Islamic values. In fact, Muslim communities have long practiced this model knowing that meaningful communal artistic engagement can improve mental health, reduce social fragmentation, and even contribute to economic well-being. When creativity is embedded in the communal and the sacred, the act of making and experiencing art together is as important as the outcome. It creates not just moments, but memories that are felt as much as they are understood. Rather than extracting data, it cultivates belonging, narrative, and healing. It asks: How did this experience change you? Did it connect you more deeply to others? To place? To self? To God?

So how do we fund art that doesn't fit the viral mold? How do we support artists whose work doesn't scale, but transforms? This is where a value-for-value model comes into play. It is essential for PodSystems to reaffirm a timeless truth in that time, presence, and effort are sacred currencies, especially in communal endeavors. Unlike the extractive logic of centralized monetization platforms, value-for-value invites the audience into voluntary reciprocity where it is based on gratitude and trust rather than just being merely transactional.For a communal art project like ours, the most valuable thing you can provide is your participation in the art itself. Community membership is thus valued just as much as any payment, sponsorship, or donation.

Within Islamic tradition, volunteerism is not just a sadaqah (charity); it is ibadah, a tangible form of service to creation and, by extension, to the Creator. This means that those who offer their time, skills, and presence are just as vital as those who provide funding. Artists, developers, and producers at PodSystems are not pricing their productions based on market scarcity or mass appeal, but on barakah, or its capacity to nourish hearts both inside our own community and beyond. Those who receive value (spiritual, emotional, intellectual) are invited to return value (financial, social, reputational) according to their means.

Open protocols like Bitcoin and Nostr can support this model in powerful ways. As decentralized and censorship-resistant systems, they enable direct peer-to-peer exchange without the need for intermediaries that often take significant fees or impose ideological controls. This is especially relevant for Muslim artists working across borders or in regions with unstable infrastructure. Likewise, Lightning Network-based tipping allows supporters to contribute in small, voluntary, and globally accessible ways. Importantly, these tools are just that—tools—and their ethical alignment depends on how they're used. But in the hands of intentional communities, they can empower art that is collective, sincere, transformative, and spiritually anchored.

Communal art projects flourish not only through money but through intention-filled action—hands that code, voices reciting, stories that are shared, and elders who bless the space with wisdom. From an economic perspective, volunteer labor reduces financial barriers to participation, which allow for more inclusive and cross-class involvement. It democratizes access to both art-making and art-receiving. From a spiritual perspective, it transforms the art itself into a vessel of barakah, essentially a product of sincere collective effort rather than outsourced production. By broadening our definition of value, we cultivate community that is not just made of consumers of art but co-creators of meaning. In this way, PodSystems becomes not only a podcast incubator but a microcosm of a just and compassionate Islamic culture and economy.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said, “Actions are judged by intentions.” In the domain of art and economy, this hadith offers both a warning and a promise. If we create only to capture attention, we may find our work spiritually hollow. But if we create with sincerity, presence, and service to our communities, our efforts carry barakah, even if they never go viral. Let us build art that doesn’t just speak, but listens. Let us invest in beauty that deepens our worship, our wellness, and our sense of belonging. Let us create not for the algorithm, but for the Ummah, and for the Akhirah.

If we treat our imperative of producing art merely as a content creation machine, we risk losing its deeper social function as a site of healing, communion, and transformation. Art is not attention bait, but a sacred, shared human experience that feeds not only the market, but the soul. Producing communal art roots us in collective meaning, awakens the heart to God through beauty, and reshapes our economic imagination around participation rather than passive consumption.

As Muslim creatives and organizers, PodSystems see its position as cultural infrastructure where art becomes the civilizational scaffolding. By cultivating and growing a space where beauty is made, not marketed, and where creativity is shared, not commodified, PodSystems offers a model for what the future of Islam can look like—vibrant, rooted, and spiritually nourishing. The aim to create new Islamicate mythos is not merely about storytelling; it is about world-building. It is about restoring the soul of culture through art that connects, uplifts, and reorients.

PodSystems is more than a media project—it is an invitation to reimagine Islam not only as true, but as beautiful and profoundly livable. An invitation, not just to consume, admire, or support, but to immerse, contribute, and co-create.

Join PodSystems!

Make art in community. Become part of a new mythos.

We’ve released three episodes of #RibaResistance now and passed ...

2026-02-08T17:37:50Z

We’ve released three episodes of #RibaResistance now and passed 1000 downloads! Have you listened to them all yet? Which was your favorite and why did it resonate with you?

quoting
nevent1q…xcdg
If you are one of our first listeners we would love to hear from you!

How was your experience listening to the show?

Was there a specific moment that you enjoyed (or didn’t)?

What is a financial challenge you’re facing right now that you hope this podcast can help you solve?

#RibaResistance

nevent1q…fdsy

#RibaResistance means leaving that which does not benefit you for ...

2026-02-08T17:25:31Z

#RibaResistance means leaving that which does not benefit you for that which is better.

quoting
nevent1q…c9mt
Exactly, there both stealing wealth but one might accelerate the inevitable while the other might slow it down giving the illusion of growth.

The illusion is credit creation, to me fractional assumes the cycle begins with the initial deposit but It actually begins with the credit. If everyone listened to Dave Ramsey and cut their credit cards after paying it back, there will be no more money left and no deposits.

Website is back online. Please resume your podcast streaming ⏯ ...

2026-02-07T16:07:49Z

Website is back online. Please resume your podcast streaming ⏯

quoting
nevent1q…6a3w
⚠ We are aware the website is currently down (this includes the RSS feed). Please standby as we work through this issue.

⚠ We are aware the website is currently down (this includes the ...

2026-02-07T05:54:41Z

⚠ We are aware the website is currently down (this includes the RSS feed). Please standby as we work through this issue.

"In this episode, we break down how fiat money actually ...

2026-02-06T19:48:16Z

"In this episode, we break down how fiat money actually works—and why inflation functions as a tool of wealth extraction rather than an economic accident. We explore money supply expansion as a deliberate policy choice, its intrinsic connection to riba, and why inflation amounts to legalized theft with fiat currency as slow-motion robbery. The conversation traces how this system quietly erodes generational wealth, with particular harm to Muslim communities, while also examining the broader geopolitical consequences of fiat-based monetary power."

quoting
nevent1q…cpmm
⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 3 - NOW STREAMING ON fountain_app (npub1v5u…n0v5)

https://fountain.fm/episode/tCr6Abzl37FZP7NiSKoc

⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 3 - NOW STREAMING ON ...

2026-02-06T06:11:59Z

⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 3 - NOW STREAMING ON fountain_app (npub1v5u…n0v5)

https://fountain.fm/episode/tCr6Abzl37FZP7NiSKoc

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE: RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 3 NOW ...

2026-02-05T21:47:03Z

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE:

RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 3

NOW STREAMING EXCLUSIVELY ON NOSTR

quoting
nevent1q…h26g
RIBA RESISTANCE - HOW THE FIAT SYSTEM STEALS YOUR FUTURE - EPISODE 3

https://podsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/RR_ep3_FINAL.mp3

RIBA RESISTANCE - HOW THE FIAT SYSTEM STEALS YOUR FUTURE - ...

2026-02-05T21:46:13Z

RIBA RESISTANCE - HOW THE FIAT SYSTEM STEALS YOUR FUTURE - EPISODE 3

https://podsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/RR_ep3_FINAL.mp3

What are you doing to escape the "dust of riba"? ...

2026-02-04T20:13:23Z

What are you doing to escape the "dust of riba"?

#RibaResistance

Special thank to all our anonymous zappers on @npub1v5u…n0v5 ...

2026-02-04T20:04:40Z

Special thank to all our anonymous zappers on fountain_app (npub1v5u…n0v5) this past week. There’s been a lot of you! ⚡

Catch up on episode 2 of #RibaResistance today!

https://fountain.fm/episode/IxjYEKt4AkSseng8pFza

Episode 3 of #RibaResistance airs February 5, exlusively on ...

2026-02-02T08:32:20Z

Episode 3 of #RibaResistance airs February 5, exlusively on nostr!

The third episode is titled - How the Fiat System Steals Your Future

* Streaming available everywhere the day after.

Episode 2 now streaming ⚡ ...

2026-01-31T22:09:30Z

In reply to nevent1q…hzkd
_________________________

Episode 2 now streaming ⚡

https://fountain.fm/episode/IxjYEKt4AkSseng8pFza

“Wherever books are sold” happens to be online these days. ...

2026-01-31T09:26:40Z

“Wherever books are sold” happens to be online these days. But Anti-Riba Money by Mbitcoiner (npub1uzf…57h3) can be downloaded for free on the BitcoinMajlis (npub1f7n…m25c) website:

https://bitcoinmajlis.org/anti-riba-money/

Who knew PodSystems would be running ads? 😂 In all ...

2026-01-31T09:21:11Z

Who knew PodSystems would be running ads? 😂

In all transparency, there is zero monetization happening from ads. They are just some experemental stuff that we place to help with the pacing of the episodes.

quoting
nevent1q…wksr
I like the quality of the ads. Keep it up

Special thanks to all our #RibaResistance listeners 🙏 We hit ...

2026-01-31T09:10:21Z

Special thanks to all our #RibaResistance listeners 🙏

We hit 500 downloads in our first week 🎉

And now you can stream our second episode!

More news to share soon about future projects - there’s lots to be excited about!

⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 2 - NOW STREAMING ON ...

2026-01-30T07:03:59Z

⚡ RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 2 - NOW STREAMING ON fountain_app (npub1v5u…n0v5)

https://fountain.fm/episode/IxjYEKt4AkSseng8pFza

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE: RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 2 NOW ...

2026-01-29T21:49:28Z

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE:

RIBA RESISTANCE - EPISODE 2

NOW STREAMING EXCLUSIVELY ON NOSTR

quoting
nevent1q…524n
RIBA RESISTANCE - WHAT IS RIBA AND WHY IS IT HARAM? - EPISODE 2

https://podsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/RR_ep2-FINAL.mp3

RIBA RESISTANCE - WHAT IS RIBA AND WHY IS IT HARAM? - EPISODE 2 ...

2026-01-29T21:47:27Z

RIBA RESISTANCE - WHAT IS RIBA AND WHY IS IT HARAM? - EPISODE 2

https://podsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/RR_ep2-FINAL.mp3

⚡Amazing! #RibaResistance has passed 400 downloads already 🎉 ...

2026-01-29T09:43:32Z

⚡Amazing! #RibaResistance has passed 400 downloads already 🎉

Over 30% of our listeners did so on nostr! 🥰

If you have yet to listen do so fast because the next episode is dropping on nostr later today. 🎧

quoting
nevent1q…5cj0

RIBA RESISTANCE - SERIES TRAILER

https://cdn.satellite.earth/bb9f36a9eac9342eb0e5f8495b3268b3b165ae50300b54405151d1f26b9a8cf2.mp3

https://fountain.fm/episode/8K5LLaSeaCydGrsbhFlK

"Bitcoin offers a way out, not just as a superior form of ...

2026-01-27T20:06:27Z

"Bitcoin offers a way out, not just as a superior form of money, but as a tool for moral and economic realignment.”

PodSystems presents:

A podcast to enable Muslims to reclaim financial sovereignty.

Streaming everywhere from January 23 through Ramadan for a total of 8 weekly episodes. Bonus content available on Nostr. Guest interviews with BTC/Zero (npub1h34…r4h0) amisatoshi (npub18z5…50l4) and Safdar Alam. This podcast is a roadmap for reclaiming financial sovereignty, rooted in Islamic ethics and built for a just, sustainable future.

quoting
nevent1q…2nvh
RIBA RESISTANCE - SERIES TRAILER

https://cdn.satellite.earth/bb9f36a9eac9342eb0e5f8495b3268b3b165ae50300b54405151d1f26b9a8cf2.mp3

RIBA RESISTANCE - SERIES TRAILER ...

2026-01-27T12:08:51Z

RIBA RESISTANCE - SERIES TRAILER

https://cdn.satellite.earth/bb9f36a9eac9342eb0e5f8495b3268b3b165ae50300b54405151d1f26b9a8cf2.mp3

Episode 2 of #RibaResistance airs January 29 exlusively on nostr! ...

2026-01-25T20:44:08Z

Episode 2 of #RibaResistance airs January 29 exlusively on nostr!

The second episode is titled - What is Riba and Why is it Haram?

* Streaming available everywhere the day after.

⚡ Share your feedback and get zapped! ⚡ PodSystems will zap ...

2026-01-25T09:30:12Z

⚡ Share your feedback and get zapped! ⚡

PodSystems will zap your note 500 sats!

*One note per npub.
*Must tag PodSystems npub or use the #RibaResistance hashtag.
*Valid for 24hours or until 15k sats total have been zapped, whichever is first.

GO! 😆

quoting
nevent1q…rean
If you are one of our first listeners we would love to hear from you!

How was your experience listening to the show?

Was there a specific moment that you enjoyed (or didn’t)?

What is a financial challenge you’re facing right now that you hope this podcast can help you solve?

#RibaResistance

nevent1q…fdsy

If you are one of our first listeners we would love to hear from ...

2026-01-25T09:19:11Z

If you are one of our first listeners we would love to hear from you!

How was your experience listening to the show?

Was there a specific moment that you enjoyed (or didn’t)?

What is a financial challenge you’re facing right now that you hope this podcast can help you solve?

#RibaResistance

quoting
nevent1q…fdsy
Wow! #RibaResistance just passed 100 downloads! 🎉

Fountain audience killed it at 47% 🔥

Thanks to all our listeners. ❤

Wow! #RibaResistance just passed 100 downloads! 🎉 Fountain ...

2026-01-25T09:05:16Z

Wow! #RibaResistance just passed 100 downloads! 🎉

Fountain audience killed it at 47% 🔥

Thanks to all our listeners. ❤

We love the feedback! 😆 Insider reveal - the actual ...

2026-01-24T18:52:41Z

We love the feedback! 😆

Insider reveal - the actual inspiration for the #RibaResistance logo came from Double Dragon.

We aimed to spark curiosity with our show logo and that does mean it might feel off-putting to some. To be clear, we aren't advocating isms, but felt that symbolism with liberation movements was fine. PodSystems is more cypherpunk than anything (we even considered a robotic fist at one point).

As for the scholarly aspect, episode 2 (airing next week) dives into this topic. We also have some guest interviews that will address this. Islamic scholarship around Bitcoin has been one of the most challenging issues that BitcoinMajlis (npub1f7n…m25c) has had to address. Any scholars who wish to engage in this discussion are encouraged to attend the upcoming Muslim Bitcoin Summit.

https://mslmbtcsummit.com

Reviews for the 1st episode are starting to come in 👀 ...

2026-01-24T05:39:35Z

Reviews for the 1st episode are starting to come in 👀

#RibaResistance

⚡RIBA RESISTANCE NOW STREAMING ON #Audible ...

2026-01-23T21:32:38Z

⚡RIBA RESISTANCE NOW STREAMING ON #Audible

https://www.audible.com/pd/B0GJD9KL9J

⚡RIBA RESISTANCE NOW STREAMING ON #Spotify ...

2026-01-23T17:23:47Z

⚡RIBA RESISTANCE NOW STREAMING ON #Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4h8JxzhbBLfpVxjOpu1q2e

And you can always listen directly on our website as well! ...

2026-01-23T04:18:51Z

In reply to nevent1q…hr3y
_________________________

And you can always listen directly on our website as well!

https://podsystems.org/podcasts

⚡RIBA RESISTANCE NOW STREAMING ON @npub1v5u…n0v5 ...

2026-01-23T03:57:18Z

⚡RIBA RESISTANCE NOW STREAMING ON fountain_app (npub1v5u…n0v5)

https://fountain.fm/episode/8K5LLaSeaCydGrsbhFlK

And available on all major streaming platforms tomorrow!

2026-01-22T21:20:14Z

In reply to nevent1q…zjvd
_________________________

And available on all major streaming platforms tomorrow!

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE: RIBA RESISTANCE NOW STREAMING ...

2026-01-22T21:18:57Z

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE:

RIBA RESISTANCE

NOW STREAMING EXCLUSIVELY ON NOSTR

quoting
nevent1q…8xk6
RIBA RESISTANCE - WHY MONEY MATTERS - EPISODE 1

https://podsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/RR_ep1_FINAL.mp3

RIBA RESISTANCE - WHY MONEY MATTERS - EPISODE 1 ...

2026-01-22T21:16:26Z

RIBA RESISTANCE - WHY MONEY MATTERS - EPISODE 1

https://podsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/RR_ep1_FINAL.mp3

You’ve heard their voices in the teaser. Now it’s time to ...

2026-01-16T15:43:49Z

You’ve heard their voices in the teaser. Now it’s time to introduce our three hosts for Riba Resistance:

Mbitcoiner (npub1uzf…57h3) is the co-founder of Bitcoin Majlis and author of book Anti-Riba Money. He's been a prominent educator in the Bitcoin space since 2020 and has been a champion of Bitcoin's compatibility with Islamic principles.

teepolitics (npub1473…g6c5) is a Network State theorist. He has been a Bitcoiner since 2017 and has a storied background in finance and banking.

kode (npub1p2e…wwhy) is the founder of Grynvault. He got into Bitcoin in 2014 and his heavily involved in exploring how bitcoin and sound money principles can be applied to business finance.

Riba Resistance is the first feature podcast production from #PodSystems and will begin releasing weekly episodes starting next week.

Special thanks to everyone who participated in the poll this week ...

2026-01-16T15:05:19Z

Special thanks to everyone who participated in the poll this week to help us select some concept art for Project Nova. We had a tie here on nostr and took it back to internally run a tie-breaker vote among our #PodSystems team.

And the winner of the 10k sat bounty was Irsham (npub157u…wdmv) 🎉

Project Nova is a fun adventure series for kids scheduled for production in 2026. We expect voice actor casting to begin after Ramadan but you will be able to see this concept art featured on our website later this month.

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE: RIBA RESISTANCE STREAMING ON NOSTR FROM ...

2026-01-15T09:01:32Z

🎧 A PODSYSTEMS UPDATE:

RIBA RESISTANCE

STREAMING ON NOSTR FROM JANUARY 22ND

quoting
nevent1q…w7j7
RIBA RESISTANCE - SERIES TEASER

https://cdn.satellite.earth/8788bc14ae765bfc32c696bd65a4c5c75d869e9304a0ceaca05bbea50fc9c716.mp3

RIBA RESISTANCE - SERIES TEASER ...

2026-01-15T09:00:21Z

RIBA RESISTANCE - SERIES TEASER

https://cdn.satellite.earth/8788bc14ae765bfc32c696bd65a4c5c75d869e9304a0ceaca05bbea50fc9c716.mp3

This past weekend #PodSystems ran an internal contest to ...

2026-01-13T15:34:34Z

This past weekend #PodSystems ran an internal contest to accelerate development on Project Nova. The task was to create concept art that could become a placeholder image on the website podcasts page. Sat bounty for the winner - 10k!

Now all the images are in and you get to help us select the best. Attached is a nostr poll event for you to vote for your favorite Project Nova concept art. Winner will receive the 10k sat bounty and the image will be featured on the PodSystems website.

Project Nova is a fun adventure series for kids scheduled for production in 2026.

To best view and engage in this nostr poll, please use:

https://pollerama.fun

quoting
nevent1q…advk
Project Nova Poll:

Select your favorite image.