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Open YouTube, and their algorithms will greet you with the latest life coach explaining how to hack your body to live life to the fullest while at the same time igniting all sorts of dopamine responses. But what about our spiritual machinery? Are you a body or do you have a body? Surely neglecting what truly makes us human will lead to excess and harm.

Even if we are not on Hajj this year, our situation is no different. We navigate through the complexities of our daily life, immersed in the never-ending responsibilities of work and family, inundated with the intrusions of technology and social media into every minute of our lives, moving from place to place and idea to idea.

Those who were graced to sit and learn at the feet of Shaykh Taha Karaan soon realized: Our teachers are indeed Allah’s greatest means to call us to true life.

An internationally recognised Islamic scholar, who saw spirituality, justice, and knowledge as integral to an authentic religious existence. Shaykh Seraj Hendricks, who passed away on the 9th of July 2020 at the age of 64, was a scholar of international repute, able to communicate and engage on the level of state leaders, religious scholars and the broader public.

I can’t breathe. George Floyd’s last words, conveying, verbatim, Eric Garner’s last words, with echoes through a long chain of souls – Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Freddie Grey, Jamar Clark, Alton Sterling, Stephon Clark and Botham Jean – is a testamentary call that should pierce every Muslim’s mind and heart.

Protests have swept across the streets of America regarding the need for new policing measures after the brutal murder of George Floyd by officers of the Minneapolis Police Department. Indeed, the cries of Americans of varying racial and ethnic backgrounds reside in the reality that Floyd is but one of countless Black people who have been killed while unarmed by law enforcement.

I pray that, as we continue to lovingly welcome and vigilantly discover the blessings inherent in Ramadan upon us, we awaken to all the moments and especially the moment that Allah has chosen to place us. A quotation from Charles Dickens, the opening to one of his novels, is worth reflecting on: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Individually, the consequence of our fears is a more fragile mind and spiritual state, wrecked with the havoc of worries on the next paycheck, the next trip to the grocery store, and the next step to resolve this global crisis.

When your heart aches for the masjid
When iftar and maghrib bring no rush
When your jama’a is one or five
In the place of a thousand men,

May you remember the Ramadan
of the mother of small child.

Has fasting [fill in number] Ramaḍāns in my life changed me? If not, why? The answers to these twin questions are my most important pre-Ramaḍān preparation.

Under the current circumstances, the Prophetic advice of “pray in your homes” should give us a bit of comfort that it is good for us to keep our homes alive with the nightly prayers in all months of the year, especially this Ramadan.

A public intellectual recently wrote that we are all living, through the coronavirus tribulation, a pandemic of death’s dominion. Are we?