Bismillah Al Rahman Al Rahim.
“In the name of God, The Most Gracious and The Most Merciful.”
DAOwah is a collective of Muslim builders, community leaders, and creators using web3 tools and the Islamic tradition to inspire, reimagine, and progress the Ummah (Muslim community) for the better.
Today, we’re living in a time of massive disruption in the ways people coordinate and exchange value online that affects almost every facet of society. Technological advancement has the effect of broadening the space of the possible and allowing us to reimagine new approaches to the way things are designed and built.
Blockchain technology — and in particular, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO’s) — enable people to coordinate and organize around shared values at scales that were previously unprecedented before the turn of the century. As we usher in a decentralized digital age, DAOwah aims to preserve the long term planning, intellectual leadership, and social cohesion that were ubiquitous during the Golden Age of Islam.
DAO’s are new kinds of organizational structures built with blockchain technology that are often described as crypto co-ops. DAO’s are collectively the greatest governance and coordination experiment to gain real traction in centuries. While DAOs may feel like a new concept, the similarities they hold to Islamic communal organizing systems, such as unions and waqfs are quite clear.
These similarities extend past DAOs and can be linked to the broader blockchain space. In fact, the first immutable ledger was revealed 1400 years ago with the Quran.
Throughout human history, centralized authorities have had the power to corrupt religious teachings. This then becomes problematic, as the followers of the religion may have trouble discerning between the source truth and fabrications. The solution is to have a source material - such as a book - that can be verified by every individual, is preserved in its original form forever, and cannot be changed or corrupted by any human - properties that resemble that of a blockchain. As this aforementioned source material is in fact the Quran - a book revealed 1400 years ago - it is effectively the first blockchain.
While the Quran has been historically preserved through a decentralized system of memorization, recitation, and teachings, we can take this a step further by using cryptography to create a mathematically verifiable version of the Quran which can be validated and permanently stored on a global decentralized network of computers.
Memorizers of the Quran (huffadh) have acted as validators of the text for over a thousand years. Now, a verifiable on-chain representation of the holy text will serve as yet another means of preservation.
As such, we’ve published the Quranic text on the "permaweb" using Arweave, a blockchain network that allows any file to be stored forever for a one-time upfront cost. It can be found for eternity via the following ID:
arweave://400d38c7-70ac-4f2c-beb7-72b1b4832ba1, or at this link.
We are a group of Muslims inspired by the societal and cultural paradigm shifts now possible with web3 and DAOs. Decentralized technology has the ability to solve a lot of the challenges our global ummah faces. This project is a simple first step towards our vision of the future.
Community has been an integral aspect of Muslim life and culture from the onset of Islam. DAOwah’s inception began with a strong desire amongst Muslim builders in web3 to have a digital third space where Muslims can feel heard, learn from one another, and build new realities inspired by web3 for our ummah.
Dawn of DAOwah
DAOwah is finally opening its gates and it's time to build together. We need the best Muslim builders in the world to come show us what's possible. We are launching a membership NFT to bootstrap the DAO and seed the waqf with initial funding. Each NFT grants you token-gated access to the DAOwah community and signals your early support and alignment with DAOwah’s mission.
The funds raised will be used to give grants to value-aligned projects and builders working on solutions for the Ummah. If you're a Muslim engineer, artist, operator, or storyteller looking to connect, reach out to us on Twitter (@daowah_).
Join our web3 community of Muslim builders, community leaders and doers!