Ruminations: Welcoming Ramadan Without Excitement

Notes on guarded hearts, the poverty of correctness alone, and seeking a tradition where love is not a rare visitor

Arriving Without Excitement

Generally, the more serious something is, the less excited I feel. It is not because I do not care. I actually think it’s because I care too much. When something carries consequence, I grow watchful. I become cautious with hope, as if hope itself can make the fall sharper.

In that vigilance, there is often a coping mechanism. I am preparing myself to be disappointed before disappointment has even arrived. I brace early, not because I don’t trust in Allah, but because I have learned what it feels like to want something deeply and still not know how it will unfold. I learned to keep my emotions at a safer distance, as if a guarded heart is less likely to break.

Ramadan just started, and I do not feel the rush that people speak about. Despite my feelings, MashaAllah, this year I have done more physical preparation than ever before. It’s like I’m trying to ready my body ahead of time so it can open a door my heart has been hesitant to enter. I hope I can derive some spiritual benefit.

But this is a serious time, particularly for me, as someone in a period of transition. Six months ago, I was blessed to start a new position after resigning from the ADAMS Center. I am still processing what it means to have stepped away from full-time imam duties. That kind of departure does not finish when the letter is sent or the role is formally concluded. The body may leave a schedule; the heart leaves more slowly. I don’t think I realized how much of my identity was braided into service until that braid was loosened and I felt, unexpectedly, the air on my skin.

When a role changes, the world does not always understand the internal cost. From the outside, it can look like relief, like freedom, like a clean turning of the page. Even if it actually is, inside, it can feel more like learning to stand differently. We can be grateful and unsettled at the same time. For me, my schedule has opened up, but part of me still reaches for the old urgency. The heart does not move in straight lines, and transition is rarely tidy.

Now, as someone trying to grow in a new position and deeply concerned with emotional and spiritual growth, the arrival of Ramadan feels like an invitation and a question. If the last seasons of my life trained me to be steady through responsibility, what happens when responsibility is not the main structure holding the days together? If my faith has often been expressed through the care of others, what does it look like when Allah asks me to be cared for by the month itself?

I have been reflecting on what it means to enter Ramadan with a different mindset. Not as a month to prove myself. Not as a month to perform spiritual intensity on command. Something closer to retreat. A resetting. A pause that is not laziness but attentiveness. A chance to reflect without immediately converting reflection into productivity. A month that becomes, quietly, a launchpad for the next part of life’s journey—not because I have answers, but because I pray to be placed back in Allah’s hands with less resistance.

If there is a hope hidden in all this seriousness, it is that Ramadan might allow me to be spiritually vulnerable without panic. That it might teach me, again, what it means to trust Allah without demanding emotional certainty first. That it might become a space where my heart can take root—sincere, deep, and, by His mercy, more connected than before.

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Spiritual Bankruptcy In A Secular Atmosphere

If we are honest, a guarded heart does not form in isolation. It forms in an atmosphere. Many of us are living in a world trained to trust only what can be measured, tested, and explained. This is not only a way of thinking. It becomes a way of feeling. It teaches us which emotions are respectable and which are embarrassing. It teaches us which kinds of spiritual language are safe in public and which kinds of longing we should keep private.

In such a world, spirituality is often reduced to two narrow possibilities. Either it becomes the fantastical—the kind of story that can entertain us or impress others—or it becomes the debunkable, the kind of experience we rush to explain away so we do not look naïve. The quiet middle ground disappears: the ordinary interior life where reverence grows slowly, where worship settles into the bones.

Over time, we do not always lose religion. Sometimes we lose dhawq (taste). We keep the vocabulary, but we become poor in inward nourishment. We can speak about Allah with fluency, but struggle to sit in His presence without reaching for something else. We become crowded inside. It is not always sin. Sometimes it is spiritual bankruptcy: information without intimacy, knowledge without tenderness, correctness without sweetness.

And in the West, there is an added distance many of us feel, even when we can’t name it. We are far from many of the traditional sources of Islamic spirituality. Islam is still young in America. The roots are growing, but the inherited atmosphere that forms hearts over centuries is not always readily available to us. We can find scholars and seminaries—lectures and books. What is harder to find is that dhawq itself: spiritually rooted scholarship that imbues the heart with illumination through genuine slow tarbiya (spiritual cultivation). Additionally, the subtle byproduct of that cultivation: community—where remembrance is normal, where virtue is not a performance, where love is experienced.

This does not mean Allah is far. But it can mean that we do not always know how to live near. And because we are far from living wells, we often do not know what we do not know. We can become spiritually ignorant in the most subtle way: not ignorant of facts, but ignorant of what the heart is meant to feel, what the soul is meant to recognize, what a spiritually formed life even looks like when it is healthy. We mistake dryness for normal. We mistake numbness for maturity. We confuse being informed with being formed. And in that condition, we cannot even imagine our spiritual potential, because we have not seen its shape lived in front of us often enough to believe it is possible for us.

Then we overcompensate. We become busy. We become sharp. We become anxious about being correct, because correctness feels like the one thing we can control in a world that keeps shifting under our feet. And somewhere in that tightening, we become emotionally cold and numb. We reduce religion to information—facts and data—while remaining deprived of deep spiritual knowledge that illuminates the heart. The soul grows tired, and we call it a lack of motivation when it may actually be a lack of inward replenishment.

Still, the longing remains. We long for transcendence. We long for meaning and embodiment. We want a religion that not only tells us what is true, but also helps us taste it. We want to feel the Sunnah (the prophetic tradition) landing somewhere deeper than the mind. Yet we remain crowded by the world—guarded, disciplined, overstimulated—longing without language, and often without a safe way to admit the longing.

“You must endure with patience whatever is decreed by destiny [qadar], until suffering is transformed into certainty [yaqīn]. Patience is the foundation of all that is good. The angels [malā’ika] were afflicted with trials and tribulations, and they bore them with patience. The Prophets [anbiyā’] were afflicted with trials and tribulations, and they bore them with patience. The righteous [ṣāliḥūn] have been afflicted with trials and tribulations, and they have borne them with patience. Now you are following in the footsteps of the people [of the Lord], so you must do as they did. You must endure with patience as they endured with patience.”

–Sh. Abdul-Qadir Al-Jilani (d. 561/1166)¹

Love, Beauty, and the Tradition I Want to Live Inside

What I find myself yearning for is not more information. I do not mean that knowledge is unimportant. I mean that knowledge, on its own, does not always warm what has grown cold. It can sharpen us. It can organize us. It can even protect us. But it does not necessarily soften us. And I am realizing, with increasing clarity, what I want in this season of life is tenderness and peacefulness. Not weakness or stillness. Tenderness as life. Tenderness as receptivity. Tenderness as a heart that can actually be moved.

For a long time, much of my spiritual energy was spent on what is correct: sound belief, right practice, and careful boundaries. There is mercy in that. Correctness matters. It guards the path. But there is also a way to live inside correctness while remaining untouched by it, as if religion is something we carry in the mind and perform with the body, while the heart stays safely behind glass. I do not want that kind of religion anymore. I want Islam to be something that brings life into my inner world and beauty into my character. I want to approach the tradition through ihsan (spiritual excellence), not as an abstract ideal, but as a lived possibility.

If I am looking for what ihsan looks like lived, the tradition points to love. Our tradition speaks about love without embarrassment. Love is not treated as decoration. It is treated as a measure. The Quran teaches us that we will not attain piety until we give from what we love.² That is the kind of line that exposes us, gently but completely. Because we can give what we do not care about and still remain unchanged. We can donate what costs us nothing and still keep our hearts attached to comfort. But to give from what we love means love is being redirected. It means the heart is being taught a new gravity.

And the tradition does not let love remain abstract. The Prophet ﷺ informed us, “None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.”³ That is not a sentimental statement. It is a diagnosis of the heart. It means faith is not only what we affirm. Faith is also what expands us. It makes the self less cramped. It makes generosity feel natural rather than forced. And that is what I am asking Ramadan for: not only to correct me, but to redirect me.

This is also why I keep returning to the Prophet ﷺ. Not only as a model to study, but as someone to love. I want him to become beloved in my heart, not merely respected in the mind. When people truly love someone, they overflow. They mention them without strain. They brighten when they think of them. They become better in their presence, even if that presence is through memory and longing. I want that kind of relationship with the Prophet ﷺ, where remembrance is not duty alone, but warmth. Where his character not only informs me, but also reforms me.

Maybe that is why the longing to see the Prophet ﷺ in a dream feels so tender. Not because dreams are the goal. Not because we need spectacle to prove anything. But because the soul, at times, aches for intimacy. It aches for nearness. It aches for a sign that love can become real again, not as an idea, but as an experience that softens and steadies us.

And it is not only the Prophet ﷺ. I want the righteous to become beloved. I want the awliya (friends of Allah) to feel less like distant names and more like companions whose remembrance elevates us without crushing us. There is a kind of spiritual companionship that forms us slowly, even if we never met those people in the worldly sense. Love makes that companionship possible. It turns inspiration into aspiration, and aspiration into patience.

Because love, in the end, is not something we can manufacture on command. It is something we ask Allah for, and then strive for with sincerity. We return to the practices that open the heart—adab (decorum), dhikr (remembrance), and fikr (contemplation)—and we accept that the heart opens in its own time. My teachers have reminded me that the longing itself is a sign of sincerity—not what materializes, not our assumptions about ourselves. That is where patience becomes more than endurance. Patience becomes trust. It becomes the belief that Allah can bring life back into places we have learned to keep guarded.

I am not arriving at Ramadan with excitement. But I am arriving with longing. Longing for a religion that I can live inside. A tradition that not only tells me what is true, but helps me feel what is true. A way of being Muslim where love is not a rare visitor, and beauty is not an afterthought.

I pray Ramadan becomes the space where this seeking can deepen—where the heart softens not on command, but by mercy.

Ultimately, with Allah is all success.

1. al-Jīlānī, ʿAbd al-Qādir. The Removal of Cares (Jalāʾ al-Khawāṭir): A Collection of Forty-Five Discourses. Translated by Muhtar Holland. 2nd ed. Redmond, WA: Al-Baz Publishing, 2007. 33.

2. Quran 3:92.

3. Hadith 13, 40 Hadith an-Nawawi.