Welcome to my digital sanctuary! I am a writer, SEO specialist and developer working on scholarly resources for Muslim apologetics and building tools that keep the web open and honest.
That is four jobs pulling in one direction: making sourced work easy to find and hard to fake.
Search
I have been optimising sites since 2006, back when a keyword-stuffed footer still passed for strategy.
Good SEO work only gets better over time. It’s only search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change.
— Jill Whalen
The point on this side of the work is narrow. Careful scholarship is worthless if the person who needs it cannot find it, and a great deal of it gets published by people who have never once thought about a title tag. So the SEO posts here deal with the parts that survive an algorithm update: site architecture, internal linking, schema that actually validates, and copy written for a human being who might read it.
The plugins
Everything I build started as something that irritated me on one of my own sites.
Cite came from wanting footnotes in WordPress that behave the way footnotes behave in a book: numbered, linked in both directions, and stable when the post gets edited. Endmark exists because I refused to give up a typographic habit. Auto Justify Content handles justified body text across a few hundred posts without my touching each one by hand. Other projects such as Abstract Box and Custom Guest Authors also began the same way.
Themes as well. Most of mine carry self-hosted Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic and Akkadian faces, because a page quoting four scripts should not have to ask a font CDN for permission to render.
House rules
Assets live where they belong. JavaScript in /js/, styles in /css/, nothing inlined into a template because it was quicker that afternoon.
Settings screens get tabs the moment there is more than a screenful of options. The interface stays flat and quiet, with the colour scheme configurable, because somebody has to look at it all day. Every release ships with its documentation: changelog, upgrade notes, and a single source of truth I keep current. Version numbers mean something here.
Nothing phones home. Analytics stay out unless the site owner puts them there, and the source stays readable. A plugin that reports your readers to somebody else has picked a side.
Apologetics
The work is defensive. Somebody publishes a claim about Islam, and I go and check whether that claim survives its own sources.
Which usually means reading both sides in the language they were written in, quoting at length, and giving the page number. Most polemic falls apart at the footnote. A quotation turns out to have been trimmed at the point where it stopped being useful. The manuscript says something other than what was claimed for it. A “scholarly consensus” resolves, on inspection, into one nineteenth-century orientalist whom everybody afterwards copied.
I am an apologist, so nobody reading this is being invited to convert. The writing ends up at Bismika Allahuma. The video goes out as The Muslim Apologist.
What I publish
Books and long-form come out under Langgam Fikir, in Malay and in English. The last one was Paulus Perosak Risalah al-Masīḥ (2025), 194 pages on Paul of Tarsus.
Get in touch
Thank you for stopping by, and I invite you to dive deep into the blog, subscribe to my YouTube channel, and connect with me on social media. For collaborations, consultations, or just friendly conversations, feel free to reach out.
Let’s embark on this exciting digital journey together!