The Digital Islamicate
There’s a word that historians use to describe the civilizational world of Islam, not merely its states or its borders, but the full span of its culture, its scholarship, its trade routes and its conversations across continents and centuries.
That word is Islamicate. It names something larger than any single empire or dynasty: the shared world that Muslims built together, across difference, across distance, across time.
The Digital Islamicate exists to carry that tradition forward, to make Muslim thought visible again, across the distances of the modern world.
The Problem
If you’ve written anything on Nostr, you know this feeling: you spend a massive amount of time and effort writing a well-researched article… and then it falls flat. No one sees or reads your article, not because your article is bad, but because people don’t even know it exists.
That sucks. But, if you’re reading this article, then you might’ve come to it from the solution itself.
The Solution
The Digital Islamicate is a website that automatically fetches your articles from Nostr and hosts them on the website with great typography, text to speech, and reading features that make readers actually want to hear what you have to say.
What Muslim writers on Nostr need is:
-
Visibility
-
The reader’s time
-
The reader’s recurrence
-
Visibility:
A lot of the time, your articles fall on deaf ears. No one even knows that you wrote an article.
On Digital Islamicate, readers can be notified when you publish a new article, and the design of the website is structured so that the most recent articles are shown first to get you that initial start.
-
The reader’s time:
Sometimes people may just not have the time to sit for a 15 minute read, even if the article is great.
The solution to this is… not sitting at all! Readers can choose to listen to an article through text-to-speech. There’s male and female voice options, speed controls, the whole kit. Think of it like a podcast.
-
The reader’s recurrence:
If a reader likes one of your articles, you’d want them to come back and read another article, right?
A reader can click on your author page and see all the articles you’ve written, or if they’re listening to your article, the next article auto-plays.
Furthermore, your author page also has a zap button which leads them to your Nostr page on Yakihonne, letting them zap you, see your notes, and other articles.
Why this is useful:
When your posts go on The Digital Islamicate, readers will actually see what you write. The people who use the website are avid readers.
It resonates with a lot more people than you might think, a hub where I can find, read, or listen to articles by Muslims without much hassle.
It has a clean easy-to-look-at UI and works seamlessly for mobile users too.
But what makes this different?
“Why not just use an article reading thing on Nostr like Habla?” I hear you say.
Well friend, tags on Nostr aren’t enough to filter actually good articles.
We filter and handpick Muslim writers and articles that are very well written and resonate with the audience that YOU want reading your articles!
Nostr article reading apps like Habla don’t have the vision that The Digital Islamicate was built for. It is a PWA app that can be used without having to go through Google Play or Apple. We are actively moving away from their clutches into a system where Muslims can directly learn, engage with and support other Muslims (zaps) and this is a first step.
If you’re a Muslim writer on Nostr, your words deserve an audience. Reach out, we’d be honored to feature your work.
Have a read at https://digitalislamicate.com/
#staySAIF
Write a comment