On Spiritual Intensification, Consumption, and the Logic Governing Our Ramadan
Ramadan is a sacred month of intensification and embodied learning, formed through action rather than concepts. Fasting disciplines appetite. Staying up late in worship shifts sleep. Desire is restricted. Qur’an recitation and charity increase. Devotion deepens. The body is placed under limitation. The month slows the self in order to refine awareness of our reliance on God. Increase, in this sense, is oriented toward taqwa and a refinement of consciousness.
Ramadan now unfolds within a religious learning ecosystem mediated by social media platforms that are optimised for maximization. The month is peak season for religious content due to the intensification it calls for. The desire to learn more in Ramadan is sincere and praiseworthy. However, when this intensification is absorbed into the broader ecosystem of the Muslim Education Industrial Complex which is governed by scale, visibility, and optimisation, the meaning of increase and intensification subtly shifts and we risk adopting frameworks and logics that place volume, visibility, and consumption as proxies for avenues of proximity to God.
The question is not whether to intensify, but discerning what logic governs that intensification. There is a danger of capitalist optimisation logic governing sacred devotional intensity. Ramadan’s pedagogy is characterised by reflection, discernment, discipline and restraint. I assert that these principles should also be applied to knowledge intake. Because fasting reconditions appetite, it would be consistent with our understanding of Ramadan to then ask whether the appetite for continuous religious knowledge accumulation also requires reconditioning.
Muslim communal exceptionalism has often functioned as a barrier to ethical communal self-examination. We often resist critique by appealing to our sacred identity. For example, when we accept compulsive scrolling, doomscrolling, and rename it “deenscrolling,” we assume the structure and the behaviour it engenders has been redeemed because the content is religious. However, the religious nature of the content does not redeem the addictive design of the medium. A platform built to cultivate continuous engagement will continue to shape desire in that direction, even if the material is religious. By behaving as though the pernicious nature of the medium is undone by the nature of the content, we treat the religious element as immunity from spiritual and structural critique.
Whether through retreats, courses, series, or curated bundles, this is where discernment becomes necessary. Under what logic does our Ramadan intensification sit? What is shaping our religious formation, and how?
Perhaps we can pause and consider our religious content consumption:
What governs my intake?
Is the intake deepening presence or just an increase of inputs?
Am I responding to need or to availability?
What tells me I have done enough?
Have I allowed time for metabolising or am I allowing mass consumption to substitute ethical action?
If fasting reconstitutes our relationship to food, perhaps it should also reconstitute our relationship to religious content. The month does not require a complete withdrawal from learning. It requires attention to the self that seeks it. Perhaps the work of this month may not be to consume more, but to recognize the desire for consumption as the capitalist manifestation it is. Maybe the work is to sit with what we have received and to allow it to work on us before we reach for the next new thing.
