Is working in big tech halal? Muslim workers are reckoning with the possibility that their jobs go against their religious obligations
Before Ibtihal Aboussad was fired byMicrosoftfor protesting the company’s work with theIsraelimilitary during a celebration of the firm’s 50th anniversary, she sent two emails.
The first went to all of her colleagues. She appealed to their universal humanity and urged them to stand against Microsoft’s contracts to provide cloud computing software andartificial intelligenceproducts to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
She sent the second to the “Muslims at Microsoft” email list. Its subject line read: “Muslims ofMicrosoft, Our Code Kills Palestinians.”
With her email, Aboussad told the Guardian, she wanted Muslim staff of companies such asMicrosoft,Google and Amazonto stop regarding the question of whether they organize against their employer’s work with the IDF as an issue of secular or professional ethics. It was a question of Islam, of their faith, she argued.
“I wanted to say, ‘Hey, remember, yourrizq[livelihood] is from Allah,’” Aboussad said. “It should be clean, and you cannot be contributing to oppression.”
There’s been protests within American tech companies against their contracts with Israel and its military since the start of the war in Gaza. There have been walkouts and vigils. Offices have been taken over and op-eds have been written. Some staff have resigned and some have been fired for their activism.
But as the war endures and Palestinians in Gaza are being starved, forcibly displaced and killed, and the contracts have survived, there’s a growing group of Muslim staffers who are unsure whether they can religiously justify working at companies that they view as effectively defense contractors.
The Guardian spoke with nearly a dozen Muslim employees of major tech companies who’ve been grappling with the question, many of whom asked not to be named for fear of professional repercussions or because they are continuing to organize inside the companies.
Several of the staffers have resigned or are in the process of resigning. Some said they aren’t convinced that their employers have crossed a line that would force them to quit. Others worried that leaving the company would do more harm than good.
Nearly all said that the public protest of Aboussad, and her co-demonstrator Vaniya Agrawal, has pressed the question. And at least for some, the footage of Aboussad – a hijab-clad young woman staring down Microsoft’s AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, and calling him a war profiteer – has been activating.
Organizers at No Azure for Apartheid (NoAA), the worker-led group at Microsoft that Aboussad belongs to, and whose name refers to Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform, say that they’ve heard from more staffers looking to get involved with the group since Aboussad’s action. And they’ve heard from more than a dozen workers looking to resign or lodge a protest, and several more who have already done so.
Others are on the fence, with some in a constant spiritual crisis over whether they should resign. The reasons vary: some feel they can do more to agitate against these contracts from inside the company, others worry about being able to provide for their families and some worry about trying to find another tech job in a tough market.
“Honestly, I’ve been praying about what Allah wants me to do,” one Microsoft employee said. “Because it doesn’t seem like it’s right for a Muslim to continue working for such companies. But if we leave, then there could be a pro-Israeli person who takes our spot, and then you’re not serving the cause by doing this.”
OneGoogleworker said they decided it no longer feels halal to remain at the company. But their father doesn’t agree: he argues it’s their “Islamic duty” to stay at the company because the role was a blessing from God. “He said this is self-sabotage,” the worker said.
“My parents are like, ‘If you quit, how does that help the cause?’ I don’t think they understand that by quitting I am not trying to help the cause,” the Google staffer said. “I’m at a [spiritual and moral] negative right now. I’m just trying to go back to neutral. Every day my work is actively harming people. I can’t help people if I’m actively harming them.”
The debate is not confined to the cafeterias of tech companies. Several tech workers said they have sought the spiritual insight of popular Islamic scholars, including Imam Omar Suleiman, the founding president of the Yaqeen Institute, a Texas-based Islamic research organization. Suleiman is actively engaging with Microsoft workers to help determine “if there’s any part of Microsoft that wouldn’t be considered complicit in this”, he said. The imam said he is still grappling with the question of whether and how urgently Muslims need to quit their tech jobs, leaving the workers to wrestle with it privately for now.
“More fields of employment are complicated than not,” Suleiman said. “It’s not always as straightforward as someone that works at a liquor store. It’s someone that works at a grocery store [that sells alcohol].”
Details of how big tech works with the IDF have long been murky, and many tech staffers had mostly accepted their employers’ denials or defenses of these contracts. But recently, evidence that the tech industry’s products have been used in Israel’s violent campaign in Gaza, which the UN has concluded is consistent with “the characteristics of genocide”, has been mounting.
Microsoft deepened its ties with the Israeli military in the wake of Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attacks, according to a Guardianinvestigationreported in collaboration with +972 Magazine and Local Call, based in part on documents obtained by Drop Site News. Leaked documentsindicatedMicrosoft has a “footprint in all major military infrastructures” in Israel. The Associated Press has also reported that Microsoft technology has aided in Israel’ssurveillanceof Palestinians.
Microsoft hasdefendedits contract with the IDF, saying that an internal investigation concluded the firm “found no evidence” that its technology was used by the IDF to target or harm people.
Microsoft’s chief communications officer, Frank Shaw, reiterated those findings and said these reports “are not accurate”.
“As we stated before in our blog, we have found no evidence to date that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza,” he said in a statement.
The company’s investigation did nothing to assuage workers. Hossam Nasr, an organizer with NoAA who was fired by Microsoft afterorganizing a vigilfor Palestinians in 2024, argued there is no way to have an “ethical” contract with a military “whose leaders are wanted by the international criminal court for war crimes”.
Google andAmazonboth provide cloud services to the Israeli military and government under a $1.2bn agreement dubbed “Project Nimbus”.
Google has maintained that its technology is not aimed at military work, but reporting suggests the tech giant providescloud services as well as advanced AI and machine learning toolsthat directly equip the Israeli military with various features including image and object detection and analysis. Google and Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.
Many of the tech workers the Guardian spoke with said the recent revelations about the depth of their employers’ work with the IDF and the lack of sufficient response to worker opposition to the contracts felt like a mask-off moment, one that left little doubt about their employers’ roles in Israel’s offensive and even less hope that the companies might stop working with the Israeli military.
In April, the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement, which seeks to use economic means to protest Israel’s occupation and siege of thePalestinian territories, added Microsoft to its list of companies to boycott, further pressing the issue for many Muslim tech workers.
It was ultimately these revelations that moved Aboussad to stage her protest at Microsoft’s 50th anniversary event in April. But there were other factors: in addition to becoming involved with NoAA in February 2025, Aboussad had also started wearing hijab at the end of 2023, and she felt a new responsibility as someone who was more visibly Muslim to represent her faith appropriately and stand in opposition to the company’s contract with the IDF.
In her email to Muslim staff, she included an essay written by Hasan Ibraheem, one of severalGoogle workers firedfor occupying the company’s New York office the year before. The essay was meant to serve as a “dire callout to our community”, Aboussad wrote in the email.
“To my Muslim brothers and sisters, I offer this essay as a sincere naseeha [advice],” Ibraheem’s essay began. Then he quoted from the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him):
“Whosoever of you sees an evil, let him change it with his hand; and if he is not able to do so, then with his tongue; and if he is not able to do so, then with his heart – and that is the weakest of faith.”
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Ibraheem’s message was simple: Muslims have a religious obligation to stop oppression wherever they see it. Working at a company that contracts with the Israeli government as it continues its decimation of Gaza without doing anything to push back against those contracts was in violation of that obligation. Put bluntly, Muslims have two options, Ibraheem said: to either fight or quit.
“If you do not organize, you must leave,” Ibraheem wrote. “And even if you organize, your goal should be to eventually leave. Organizing does not absolve you of complicity indefinitely.”
“If you know that the company you work for is directly enabling harmful activities, then maybe your money is not completely halal,” Ibraheem said.
Aboussad said that in the days after she protested in the meeting, she received dozens of direct messages on Instagram from other Muslim tech workers. Many said she inspired them to do more to oppose their company’s actions, and some said they were even thinking of resigning, Aboussad recalled. One person said her demonstration “removed any excuses” they might have made about not doing more to oppose their employers’ work with the IDF.
The debates aren’t limited to the companies’ US offices. For some workers at Microsoft’s offices across the Middle East and north Africa, Aboussad and Agrawal’s protest was one of the first times they were confronted with the depth of their employers’ work with the Israeli military. For others, their concerns about their roles at the company had long been brewing. One worker, based out of Microsoft’s Cairo office, told the Guardian she had been weary for months of what she saw as a vehement pro-Israeli stance in Microsoft’s internal communications to employees and their lack of mention of the now more than 50,000 Palestinians who have been killed by the IDF.
The first time she began to wonder whether she belonged at Microsoft as a Muslim was when the company fired Nasr and another worker after the two organized a vigil for Palestinians.
Aboussad and Agrawal’s protest about six months later helped her answer that question, she said. Their demonstration prompted about 100 employees in the Cairo office to take a day off in protest of Microsoft’s work with Israel – an action that was just shy of striking, which is generally illegal in Egypt. On that day, she decided she would quit.
“The response of [Suleyman] and [Microsoft CEO] Satya [Nadella] was very dismissive,” she said. “And I think Satya laughed, and that sort of made me feel like, no, I don’t think I belong here, and me staying here is just supporting what they’re doing.”
None of the Google or Microsoft workers who spoke to the Guardian had any doubt about whether their employers were contributing to Israeli military operations. But some held out hope the company may switch strategies.
One person who has worked at Microsoft for nearly a dozen years said they felt betrayed by the company, which sold them on its 2014 mission of “empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more”. But they remain hopeful that internal pressure might force the company to change its policy on working with the Israeli government.
“I know during South African apartheid, the company did flip to the right side,” they said, citing Microsoft’s decision to leave South Africa in 1986 in response to the country’s laws enforcing racial discrimination. “I hope that history repeats itself and they become the company where the culture is that you make everyone feel great.”
Meanwhile, workers’ protests have continued. At Microsoft, NoAA hasdisruptedat least two more company events, prompting the company to fire at least one of the workers, Joe Lopez.
Another staffer, senior UX designerJasmina Mathieu, resigned publicly, stating in an email to leadership and employees that she could no longer work at a company that directly or indirectly enables “horrific actions done by Israel”. Since then, the Microsoft staffers said, they can no longer send emails to anyone, including human resources, that contained the words “genocide”, “Gaza”, “Palestine” or even “Vaniya Agrawal”. One worker with NoAA, Nisrine Jaradat, was able to get around the block and send an email to all Microsoft staff decrying the policy that “utterly and completely discriminate[s] against an entire nation, an entire people, and an entire community”. Jaradat called on her co-workers to either organize against the company’s work with the IDF or quit.
“If you choose to leave Microsoft to no longer be complicit in genocide do not go quietly,” Jaradat wrote.
Many workers have consulted with local religious leaders and scholars but have not been given a clear response. “We’ve been wanting to get an opinion that says, you know, ‘Just quit, you should not be working here,’ but we did not,” one Microsoft worker said. “They just say it depends on the situation.”
Imam Omar Suleiman has been helping people figure out whether working at certain companies is halal or permissible for the entire 20 years he’s been a religious leader.
Over the last two years, Muslims tech workers from around the country have reached out to Suleiman’s Yaqeen Institute with the same question: can I still work at a tech company that is helping power the Israeli military? For Suleiman, tech has been one of the hardest fields to navigate “because you have Muslims that work at various levels and tech companies are involved in this genocide to varying extents”, he said.
What Suleiman and the Yaqeen Institute – where Aboussad now works – ultimately decide matters a great deal to tech workers of a certain age. The institute is well regarded among millennial Muslims in the US for its easy-to-digest content on how to understand and apply the teachings of the Qur’an. Suleiman’s videos have garnered him more than 3 million Instagram followers. Nearly every tech worker who the Guardian spoke to cited Suleiman’s speeches shared on social media as inspiration for why they want to leave Google or Microsoft. Yet for Suleiman, who recently gave animpassioned speech, orkhutbah, at a Virginia mosque urging congregants to “have some dignity” and quit their jobs at arms manufacturers, whether Islam requires that these tech workers leave their jobs with the same urgency is still an open question. Like Suleiman’s example of a clerk at a grocery store selling alcohol alongside fruits and vegetables, it is not as clearcut if coding productivity tools poses the same grave transgression as building a bomb.
Suleiman and others at the Yaqeen Institute are working on developing a general framework that will help Muslims decide whether they can religiously justify working at any of the tech firms contracting with the IDF. That framework will be published as a resource for both local imams as well as individuals in the midst of a spiritual crisis about their jobs.
“There’s room for the person who holds back the hand of the pharaoh from inside the pharaoh’s court,” Suleiman said. “But they have to demonstrate how exactly [they are] minimizing that harm without at any point becoming a mouthpiece for oppression.”
And they need to evaluate the workings of their companies, he said. Do they produce haram, or impermissible, products, like alcohol or weapons used to kill people? In those cases, “they need to leave their job and they need to find a different job depending on what layer they participate in and how much need they have”, Suleiman said. Or is the company based around usury or interest-based transactions, which are also impermissible in Islam? In those cases, you can still work at the company, but you should up your charity to offset those haram transactions.
While Islamic jurisprudence has an established structure to make these decisions, Suleiman says tech remains a complicated matter to locate within that framework. The imam said he is still in the discovery phase on how the roles workers find themselves in at these companies align with their religious duty.
“It’s very hard to compare something that’s just purely generating weapons of mass destruction and a tech company that has a wide array of businesses, but also happens to be manufacturing for a genocide,” he said. “It’s hard for me to figure out when that line disappears.”
