1985, not Orwell’s 1984.

I was born in 1985.

One year after the date George Orwell imagined would come to define the modern fear of surveillance.

Although Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949, Orwell projected his readers into a future where privacy had become a relic, truth had become malleable, and the citizen lived under the permanent gaze of the State.

For many, 1984 became a warning.

For my generation, born immediately afterwards, the question is different.

Not how to fear surveillance.

But how to prevent it without becoming blind to genuine evil.

The twenty-first century presents a dilemma Orwell could scarcely have imagined. We possess technologies capable of observing almost every aspect of human life. Cameras populate our streets. Artificial intelligence analyses behaviour. Smartphones record our movements. Social media archives our conversations. Governments speak of national security; technology companies speak of personalisation; criminals exploit anonymity; parents fear what their children encounter online.

The temptation is to conclude that the solution is simple: observe everything.

Yet the Abrahamic traditions suggest something rather different.

They begin not with surveillance, but with dignity.

We All Begin with Adam

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said:

“Every son of Adam commits mistakes, and the best of those who commit mistakes are those who repent.”

This hadith is recorded in Sunan Ibn Majah (Hadith 4251) and Jami’ at-Tirmidhi (Hadith 2499)

The hadith begins with a profound assumption.

Not that some people are born virtuous while others are born corrupt.

Not that one race possesses greater moral worth than another.

Not that one nation has a monopoly on righteousness.

Rather, every human being shares the same origin, the same frailty and the same capacity for repentance.

The Qur’an repeatedly reminds humanity that it descends from a single pair:

“O mankind, fear your Lord, who created you from a single soul…” (Qur’an 4:1)

Elsewhere the Qur’an declares:

“O mankind, We created you from a male and a female and made you peoples and tribes so that you may know one another. Indeed, the most honoured of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous among you.” (Qur’an 49:13)

The Prophet ﷺ reinforced this principle during his Farewell Sermon:

“No Arab has superiority over a non-Arab, nor a non-Arab over an Arab; neither a white person over a black person, nor a black person over a white person, except through righteousness.”

Centuries before modern discussions of racism, ethnicity or identity politics, Islam grounded equality in a shared human ancestry.

The Hebrew Bible reaches a remarkably similar conclusion. Humanity is created by God through Adam and Eve (Genesis 1:27), and every person therefore possesses an inherent dignity that cannot be measured by race, wealth or status.

Equality is not a political invention.

It is a theological one.

THE RIGHT TO BE IMPERFECT

Modern society often behaves as though every mistake should become permanent.

Every foolish comment is archived.

Every youthful error is searchable.

Every failing risks becoming part of an individual’s digital identity forever.

In the “global town square”, every person can be “lynched” on “social media”.

Every minutiae of a person’s life pored over in detail, and often without evidence, or proof, a person can be “slated”, fuelling more and more speculation.

I am not a “Elon Musk believer” – but no person can deny this man is one of the most brilliant engineers of our times. What he has achieved – his grit, resilience, ability to go through setback after setback, the range and depth of his work, his overall work ethic, is genuinely admirable.

He has been in the middle of one controversy after another for things I don’t fully believe he “thought what he did”. They were done in the “spur of the moment” and without “fully realising” what the backlash would be.

He was “caught out”. Most people who criticise him won’t work 16-18 hours a day, won’t push the boundaries of engineering, won’t sacrifice their own lives to build something worthwhile. However, on Twitter, they have ample time to criticise what “they think he did”. 

Will she/he be able to put data centres to space? Most likely no. But ironically, on a platform owned by the man himself, they are happy to lynch him verbally.

Elon Musk has “reached the Hall of Fame” – and is in the same space as Steve Jobs, Newton, Einstein, Edison, Tesla, Faraday, Feynman and Von Neumann. If he did nothing from tomorrow, and hired 1 person to run each of his companies and sat on a beach, it won’t do anything for your bank balance or your life. Worry about your own life. Lynching him won’t do anything for your own life. 

Nobody factors in his stress or tiredness levels from the amount of work he has to do on a daily basis – week in week out, year in year out. As soon as he achieved a historic SpaceX IPO – people were on his back again. Coming from India, I haven’t seen day labourers work as hard as he does or as long as he does. 

Hang on a minute. How many of you have made reusable rockets or the world’s first private Space Company, and inspired an entire generation to even dream of going to space. Before Elon Musk, this was “impossible”. 

If you want to argue a point – like climate, or ethics of certain actions, do it in the “proper way” which is through official governmental or legal channels. Not holding pots and pans on Twitter/X and beating drums. That could be failure of self driving technology, or gas turbine data centres or certain comments made in the spur of the moment. A well written letter is far more likely to get action than a “tweet” designed to “rile” people.

I do not excuse any person’s behaviour including mine.

Abu Huraira reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “Verily, the servant may speak a single word for which he plummets into the Hellfire farther than the distance between East and West.”

Source: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 6477, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2988

Grade: Muttafaqun Alayhi (authenticity agreed upon) according to Al-Bukhari and Muslim

However, people’s opinions, ideas, evolve through life. And it is our duty as a collective society to move towards the good.

Elon apparently has a nice quote, which goes as follows :-

“Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.” [This would imply both direction and magnitude]. 

This equally applies to every nation, society and humanity in general. We are vectors, and should point towards a common good of all of humanity, and the environment and our shared planet. 

Elon’s is not a Steve Jobs’ esque “iPhone” invention which was incremental and prototypes existed of a touchscreen phone. This is the kind of “mind bending stuff” most people wouldn’t dare dream of. Even most governments shudder. Yet he did it. India’s new Rocket project, “Skyroot”, is incredible, it has not yet been able to land reusable rockets back to earth. SpaceX started in 2002. This is a whole 24 years, enough for many people reading this not to have been alive by then.

As I launched UK’s first “Sovereign AI initiative” – fahm.uk, I know the amount of work and sleepless nights it takes to get something to “half decent”. And, I don’t rate myself as an engineer, academic or a theologian or I claim it is half decent. I will wait for people to judge.

Leave the man alone! Twitter should not be a public “social media lynching” square – it should be, as this blog is, a “marketplace for ideas”.

From this highly public case study, and drawing insights from it, we can then direct our attention to the following general principle :-

The Abrahamic traditions point in another direction when it comes to surveillance, privacy, justice and preserving dignity.

Human beings are expected to fail.

Repentance is therefore not an exception to the human condition; it is part of it.

This insight has profound implications for privacy.

If every son and daughter of Adam is fallible, then society should be cautious before constructing systems that preserve every mistake indefinitely.

Justice requires accountability.

Human dignity also requires mercy.

The two are not contradictions.

They are complementary principles.

PRIVACY AS A MORAL PRINCIPLE

The Qur’an does not merely prohibit wrongdoing.

It also prohibits unnecessary intrusion.

“Do not spy on one another.” (Qur’an 49:12)

Likewise, it commands believers to seek permission before entering another’s home (Qur’an 24:27), recognising that private life possesses moral value.

The Prophet ﷺ likewise encouraged believers not to expose the private sins of others where no public harm was involved. Concealing faults, encouraging repentance and protecting dignity became recurring ethical themes throughout the Islamic tradition.

“Whoever covers an offence seeks love, but he who repeats a matter separates close friends.” (Proverbs 17:9)

Similarly:

“Hatred stirs up conflict, but love covers all offences.” (Proverbs 10:12)

These texts do not suggest ignoring injustice.

Rather, they distinguish between private moral failure and wrongdoing that harms others.

Privacy can only be breached when there is a “risk of imminent harm” or “harm has actually been done” to others. 

That distinction has become increasingly blurred in the digital age.

Technology now makes it possible to observe almost everything.

The question is whether wisdom requires that we do so.

The Abrahamic answer appears to be no.

Privacy is not the enemy of civilisation.

It is one of its foundations.

WHEN SURVEILLANCE BECOMES NECESSARY 

Privacy, however, has never been absolute.

The same traditions that protect personal dignity also insist upon justice.

Parents are entrusted with protecting their children.

Communities are expected to restrain violence, exploitation and oppression.

Governments bear responsibility for public safety.

These obligations become especially significant in cyberspace.

Children are among the most vulnerable participants in the digital world. They may be exposed to exploitation, grooming, fraud or abuse long before they possess the maturity to recognise those dangers for themselves.

Protecting children is therefore not a rejection of privacy.

It is an application of justice.

I fully support the UK’s government bill – Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 (c. 21) introduced by the UK government. which would severely curtail and/or ban social media usage under 16s.

A similar bill should be passed for AI usage as well for under 16’s and all around the world. The UK has made a leap forward for all governments to emulate. 

Coming back to the main issue, the ethical challenge is proportionality.

Surveillance should never become an end in itself.

Rather, it should remain carefully directed towards preventing genuine harm while preserving the dignity and freedom of ordinary people.

Orwell warned us about a society that trusted power more than people.

The Abrahamic traditions invite us to build a society that trusts neither blindly, but instead balances liberty with responsibility, privacy with accountability, and justice with mercy.

Perhaps, that is the lesson of 1985 Orwell was trying to communicate.

Not that Orwell was entirely right.

Nor that he was entirely wrong.

But that the future depends less upon the sophistication of our technology than upon the wisdom with which we choose to govern it.

19484 is gone. It’s time for 1985.