The Longest Night: On Religious Learning and Practice
The winter solstice is when the Northern Hemisphere tilts farthest away from the Sun, reducing the amount of daylight received. The Sun pauses at its lowest point in the sky before reversing direction, slowly giving us more daylight. As the winter solstice arrives, the light does not rush back. It returns slowly, almost imperceptibly.
This is an invitation to use the winter season as a time to pause and reflect. As Ramadan approaches, focusing that reflection on the religious learning systems that are forming us is particularly relevant.
Discernment over visibility/popularity
What draws your attention may not deserve your trust.
The MEIC rewards visibility, charisma, and branding over depth or accountability. It shapes spiritual formation through metrics, not meaning.
Pause & Reflect: What voices hold your attention right now? Why?Trust must be held not given
You have the right to question the people who shape your spiritual worldview.
The MEIC rewards credentialism and public authority without necessarily demanding relational accountability. It often silences critique in the name of adab or unity, making trust feel obligatory rather than earned.
Pause & Reflect: Who shapes your practice — and is it their words, their conduct, or their visibility that earns your trust?Overconsumption breeds addiction not depth
Addiction to content is not devotion. It can become a way of avoiding the slower, harder work of practice and return.
The MEIC monetizes spiritual dependence. It creates platforms, pipelines, and personalities that thrive on your return not to God, but to them.
Pause & Reflect: What are you consuming that may be keeping you from returning to practice?Guidance is not control
Teachers are companions, not commanders. No one gets to mediate your entire journey to Allah.
The MEIC entrenches asymmetrical authority, often replacing relational guidance with top-down control and passive consumption. It can disable personal spiritual agency under the guise of tradition.
Pause & Reflect: Does religious guidance leave you more dependent on the speaker than anchored in your own accountability to Allah?Depth is a Direction
You don’t need to know everything to shift. Movement in your spiritual life isn’t always upward or outward. Sometimes it’s being changed by what you’ve already encountered, especially when it meets you again in a new season of life.
The MEIC equates development with scale: more content, more credentials, more reach. It mirrors capitalist ideals of optimisation and constant expansion. But nearness to God isn’t a ladder. It’s constant reorientation. A consistent return.
Pause & Reflect: What have you already learned that you’re being invited to return to now?Knowledge without direction is heedless.
Learning without intention can enable a false sense of humility, one that sounds sincere but is untethered to practice.
The MEIC separates knowledge from practice. It builds institutions and identifies metrics that quantify the accumulation of discrete content, but fails to ask how that knowledge is embodied, enacted, or lived.
Pause & Reflect: What do you know but have not yet lived into?
We are our actions, not only our intentions.
Submission is a system of acts — repeated, imperfect, and returning. Capitalism teaches us that we are always lacking. The real crisis is not a lack of knowledge. It is a lack of embodiment. If our sacred learning does not liberate, integrate, or transform, we must ask what, or who, it is serving?
Learning spaces are spiritual spaces. What is taught, and what is absent, shapes direction. Self-blame often distracts us from naming these structural realities by individualizing our practice.
As the darkness begins to ebb, consider turning inward, noticing who you are becoming through the rhythms, knowledge, practices, and protections you choose.
These questions sit at the heart of my book Knowledge, Authority, and Islamic Education in the West: Reconfiguring Tradition.
