What is Consumerism? It is the idea that increasing the consumption of goods and services is always a desirable economic objective, and that a person’s well-being and happiness depend fundamentally on obtaining consumer goods and material possessions. This idea has deep roots in modern econ0mics, where the GDP-per-capita reigns as the hegemonic driving force of a nation’s financial policies.

So what is Islamic Consumerism then? It is the manifestation of the consumerist economic ethos in religious Muslim culture as a result of its application to the material needs & wants of Muslims in their private & public religious lives. Our religious experiences are no longer just about obedience & submission to Allah, but about their viability in being part of a consumerist economy.

Why is this a problem? The first issue is that unrestricted consumerism (or one restricted by neoliberal capitalism) is itself antithetical to what a modern, public Islamic economic philosophy would look like via Islamic theology, law, spirituality & ethics. The primary economic goals of a truly Islamic polity would be utilitarian in serving the interests of an akhirah-first worldview, not in serving a materialistic worldview in which endless economic growth is the ideal for human wellbeing. There are an incredible number of layers to peel back and forth here, from history, theology, spirituality, economics, ontology & ideology, and hence this discussion is not suitable for this blog article.

Beyond Islamic economic philosophy however, what I want to discuss here is the individual aspect, that this ‘Islamic’ consumerism commodifies one’s personal religious experience and makes it about material consumption, which is antithetical to what it means to be a Muslim in the Qur’an & Sunnah. In sacred text (and the resulting Sunni intellectual & spiritual tradition), our life must be one of Allah-first & akhirah-first purposefulness, obedience to Allah & His Messenger SAW, meaningful spiritual growth in ever-increasing our connection to Allah, being productive & useful in our ‘secular’ affairs, and being heralds, advocates & champions of mercy & goodness in a world of oppression & sin.

I will comment on four aspects of this problem: the commodification of the Muslim religious experience in acts of worship, social media content, Islamic knowledge & Muslim ‘religious’ organizations. I will conclude with important spiritual advice from our scholars on how to reorient ourselves spiritually in the midst of this madness, and what our mindset should be like. It is a reminder on how we can become distracted by the dunya – even if it takes on a ‘religious’ form – from Allah.

IMPORTANT: This article is by no means a criticism of making money off of ‘religious’ goods & services. I’ve highlighted this point a few times in the article. It’s a social critique of the culture that has developed from this activity occurring in the North American capitalist economy of consumption.

ALSO: I have tried to avoid sounding too cynical by presenting the silver linings and solutions when possible. Please read with an open mind.

---

Consumerism in Acts of Worship

---

The Sunnah Industry

The ‘Sunnah industry’ as I call it first started off in my youth as an innocent, small market to cater to the religious needs of Muslims. Most of these goods were religious books, prayer beads, alcohol-free perfumes, abayas, hijabs & other paraphernalia. The key distinction between this and what came after was that the objective of this small industry was to fulfill necessary requirements of Muslims in their Islamic obligations or other recommended acts of worship.

What has happened now? The ‘Sunnah industry’ has exploded to offer us what we simply do not need for our acts of worship, coupled with exorbitant prices, manipulative or invasive marketing. In addition, the pursuit of these goods & services, which are just a means, have become a distraction from the ends themselves – to increase in our obedience to Allah & His Messenger’s commands & prohibitions, rectify our inner & outer selves, and ensure that our interactions with others fulfill these ends as well.

I have personally seen young Muslims falling into debt & paying riba on a credit card just to purchase expensive hardcover Islamic books that they will never read. Absurdly expensive prayer beads are being sold while most Muslims in the West aren’t even praying their five daily prayers, let alone doing more critical dhikr on a regular basis like recitation of the Qur’an & morning/evening remembrances.

There are some ridiculous products like the Sunnah bar, an attempt to capitalize on the highly bourgeois activity of ‘snacking’ while grossly misrepresenting the concept of Sunnah – and no you are not rewarded specifically for the act of just eating honey, dates, blackseed etc.

Then there are the exploitative manifestations of the ‘Sunnah tooth brush’. This one makes me particularly angry because the fiqh of it is insanely simple in reality. Using the stick from the Arak bush is actually a very minor, optional Sunnah. The actual important Sunnah for which the Prophet SAW said, “Were it not difficult for my ummah I would have made the miswak obligatory,” applies to any applicable tool with a rough surface used to clean the teeth – this is what the word miswak in Arabic actually means. You fulfill the important Sunnah for brushing your teeth with a regular toothbrush & toothpaste. You don’t need this junk. Selling it as ‘Sunnah’ is deception.

Perhaps worse are designer abayas & hijabs worth hundreds or thousands of dollars that will only ever wear be worn to tarawih in Ramadan or Eid Prayer. What happens to the serious major sin of tabarruj the rest of the year? As my female students tell me, these designer hijabs and abayas have become a cause for concern among younger girls and women. They will stay awake at night waiting for the latest hijab to drop or obsessively buy hijabs as if they are some sort of collector’s item. These companies selling hijabs exploit the situation in inappropriate ways, such as marketing styles of hijab that do not cover properly in order to increase their sales among youth. Among the most absurd manifestations of this is an influencer whose entire platform is about glorifying divorce while advertising her own hijab brand.

I also have sharp criticisms of the ‘Islamic healing industry’ e.g. cupping, black seed etc, but I understand that this is a contentious issue among my colleagues & seniors, and I don’t want to distract from the core message of this article, so I will not address it for now. Although one that deserves mention here and will not find much disagreement is the ruqya industry. Selling giant bottles of water that you recited Qur’an over for $30 is grotesque and disturbing, not to mention the numerous cases of abuse & exploitation when it comes to ‘raqis’ who have little to no proper Islamic learning.

The Halal Food Industry

Lastly, we need to address the growing Islamic ‘halal’ food industry as a whole. This is especially an epidemic in my city, where a certain plaza has become so renowned for Muslims wasting exorbitant amounts of money and time there that I call it ‘the Ridgeway effect’.

I first experienced this culture in the Muslim world, where the entire middle & upper-class culture revolves around eating out and wasting time & money in restaurants. I remember as I would drive to my Shaykh’s house and see the parking lots of malls and restaurants choked by cars and traffic. It used to disturb me, as people wasted hours and hundreds of local currency on eating out while the poor sat on the sidelines, discarded & forgotten. I thought I had seen the end of it when I came back to Canada, but lo and behold! Muslims brought this culture with them.

The Prophet SAW commented how the worst thing we can fill is our stomachs and the dangers of idly ‘sitting in the streets’. Our scholars took the right cue from this & spoke extensively in the Islamic spiritual tradition about the dangers, evils & harms of eating too much, wasting time with people and idly sitting around in public avenues. Besides the excess wastage of time & money, there is also the problem of inappropriate gender interactions that takes place at these venues.

This culture of eating out goes into hyperdrive in Ramadan. While this is understandable to an extent as Iftar & Suhur become occasions instead of just meals, it is also disturbing when they take on a commercialized form like ‘Suhurfest’ where people will stay up the night to eat (and waste) a grotesque amount of food for hundreds of dollars as youth chat up the opposite gender in inappropriately casual contexts. Gaining weight in Ramadan is the most absurd things you can think of, and we should be ashamed that our community has become known for this even among non-Muslims.

The ugliest aspect of the ‘Ridgeway effect’ is to see poverty rates climb among Muslims as this culture settles in and inflation increases. How are these plazas full but my local charities are also constantly sending me emails about how everyday Muslims can’t afford food or rent and newspapers showing Muslim youth getting into organized & violent crime?! How are Muslims affording this? I’m willing to bet (!) that a lot of these purchases are being put on credit cards. This is not even counting the immense amount of wastage on UberEats & SkiptheDishes etc. Besides this, many of these are married, adult men and women with children wasting money and time in these places, and we are starting to see complaints from spouses and children about absent family members.

Of course none of this is taking into account the massive amount of ‘halal’ fraud: meat being sold as halal when it is anything but. The hadith & advice on the dangers of consuming haram are numerous, but we are none the wiser as we stuff food down into our bellies. I don’t have to go into detail here, as the corruption of the halal industry is well-documented and well-discussed (although not well-addressed, sadly). I’ve seen & heard some insane stories: butcher shops who advertise themselves as halal and hand-slaughtered but then buying non-halal meat from the grocery store when they run out of stock, restaurants having fake & expired certificates or none at all, importers supplying meat from random halal certifiers in Thailand who they know absolutely nothing about. But the ‘Ridgeway effect’ demands that we gluttonously eat & enjoy as long as the ‘halal’ sign is plastered on the window, with little concern about the corruption of the industry, or how much our fellow Muslims in the immediate community are suffering.

Islamic Tourism

Then there is probably one of the most absurd forms of Islamic consumerism out there: Islamic tours. Muslims are paying thousands of dollars to travel to Muslim countries to learn about their own history. The more awkward part of it is how a scholar of Islam comes on the trip too to give ‘spiritual’ reminders. There is something oddly colonial about this, and it often reminds me of British aristocrats traveling to India & Africa to ‘see the sights’ and ‘observe the savages’.

I can understand a serious student of history going on these trips, but a far simpler and economical option is simply to buy & read some excellent, engaging history books like these. There are tons of coffee table books on Islamic culture & civilization too, the type that have massive beautiful photographs that are a joy to flick through on a boring evening. Not being bothered to read 15-30 minutes of light Islamic history on a daily basis but willing to spend thousands of dollars for ‘an experience of a lifetime’ instead reflects how much the consumerist tourist industry has leached into the Western Muslim population.

Those thousands of dollars spent on these trips would be better spent on sending money to poor & conflict-stricken Muslims abroad, or even supporting those at home who are struggling to buy groceries.

There is also the issue of Umrah & Hajj trips and the highly disturbing nature of wealth disparity on display between those who can afford the grotesquely expensive hotels in front of the Grand Mosque & those who can’t, but this is out of the control of the vast majority of the ummah so I will not comment on this. What we can comment on is the commodification of the Umrah experience on social media. Umrah is an act of worship, and an intensely spiritual one at that. It is a blessed experience of dhikr, dua and reflection. There is absolutely no need to commodify that experience for others to consume on social media.

Summary

So we need to ask ourselves: do I really need that $100 prayer mat that makes it seem like I’m in the Prophet SAW’s masjid? Is it going to help me wake up on time for Fajr? Is the prayer mat I use even a factor in me praying my prayers on time, enjoying them as a form of connection with my creator, and truly connecting with Allah in more intensive forms like Qiyam-ul-layl? Or is this all a distraction? Why am I really buying that thing? Is that 11-dollar Yemeni coffee worth waiting 1 hour for after tarawih?

None of this is meant to disparage those products & services being developed that are actually useful & serve an Islamic purpose in making acts of worship easier or more fulfilling. The Sunnah & Halal Industries have a place. It’s about the consumerist culture, not the trade itself. Some examples I have seen are Islamic audiobooks, magnetic hijab clips, prayer mats with knee padding etc, Qur’an apps for phones that use AI voice recognition and alcohol-free perfumes. Even halal restaurants are a good thing as long as we don’t have the ‘Ridgeway effect’. These are all useful, necessary and in-line with fiqh or the goals & principles of the Shariah.

---

Consumerism In Social Media

---

As someone who has been active in social media for almost a decade now, I am acutely aware of this problem, and I am open to being accused of being complicit in it. In this link I will not be sharing any links so as not to distract from the main point of this section, and also to not promote anyone whose content is problematic or inappropriate.

Nothing exemplifies the consumerist nature of social media than concepts like ‘content’ and ‘content creators’. What is ‘content’? It’s literally filler for people to consume with their minds. Anything that will translate into the intermediary currencies of likes, follows and shares that the content creator can exchange into dollars.

Consumerism in social media as a whole – irrespective of the Muslim context – is a problem in itself. Data has become a commodity, to the point that we see the advent of the ‘influencer’ and ‘junk content’ – i.e. the production & consumption of data for its mere entry into our brains irrespective of its purpose, utility and benefit. It’s the pizza, burgers and chips of internet content. Fun once in a while, but if you consume them too often they’ll cause your insides to rot.

Islamic ‘content’ online is not too dissimilar. Muslim social media is filled with ‘content creators’. Even young men engaged in da’wah online have unashamedly labeled themselves as content creators on occasion.

What differentiates ‘da’wah’ from ‘content creation’?

Both da’wah & content creation have different rules. For example, da’wah requires that the preacher is qualified to preach in the first place by possessing an intermediate level grasp in the Islamic sciences, including Arabic. The hadith ‘Convey from me, even if a verse.’ is horribly misunderstood to mean that da’wah is an individual obligation on every single Muslim. It’s not. It’s a communal obligation on the ummah.

Da’wah also requires one to have the akhlaq (character) of the Prophet SAW; his worship, his asceticism, his sincerity, his gentleness, his wisdom, his mercy, his love for others to be guided etc. This was in tandem with the mission of the Prophet SAW to speak the truth, regardless of what kind of backlash it caused.

Da’wah also does not have to be seen. Public da’wah was only a part of the Prophetic mission. The Prophet SAW spent a lot of time engaging in ‘private’ da’wah, in people’s houses, in intimate conversations, in counseling & giving advice to others etc.

Content creation has its own rules, which often run contradictory to these. Knowledge is not required, only it’s apparition. Controversy and conflict ignites the algorithm, and many ‘content creators’ use this to their advantage to attract an audience, even if it destroys bonds of brotherhood & mercy between the Muslims. Or on the flip side, we have online preachers who present an overly rosy and fluffy vision of Islam, which tries hard to not offend any modern sensibilities but ends up desensitizing the public to the teachings of Islam that are not suited to the ‘modern’ palate. Why do these phenomena exist? Because the primary objective is to produce content, not to do da’wah. It feels more righteous because it’s ‘Islamic’ content. But just because it’s ‘Islamic’ content, doesn’t mean it follows the rules of Islam.

Then there are the female ‘Islamic content creators’, who are also guilty of using the strategies of controversy and conflict, but then add a another unprophetic strategy onto it: using the appeal of physical attraction. It is well known that platforms like Instagram & Tiktok thrive on Islamically inappropriate content that showcases the female form. The Muslim female content creator’s decision to show off her beauty – even if clothed – is a conscious one. Tabarruj (a Muslim women showing off her beauty in public – see above) is a major sin. So what will be the net outcome on the Last Day of such activity? We must once again question: is this da’wah? Or is this ‘content creation’?

Other culprits are accounts on social media dedicated to producing memes and animated gifs on controversial Islamic theological, jurisprudential and political topics, and their even uglier manifestation which is AI-produced content being shared with AI-produced imagery.

There are also cases – and for those who know how social media works, they are not difficult to spot – where ‘famous’ preachers and ‘shaykhs’ have paid for followers. There are employees for social media companions who have shared this with me, besides me noticing it myself.

Consuming Islamic Content vs. True Intellectual & Spiritual Growth

So what’s the problem with ‘Islamic content’, you may ask? What’s wrong if the plethora of inappropriate content we have on social media is occasionally filled with ‘Islamic’ content?

As long as rules of the Shariah are followed, there is nothing wrong with such content in and of itself. It has a place. However, it has become a massive distraction from true intellectual & spiritual growth – a subject we will revisit at the end of this article.

True intellectual growth cannot occur without learning. Learning can only occur by ‘consuming’ information in a structured & organized way that results in a constructive intellectual transformation. This is the science of pedagogy in education. Put simply, the ‘content’ we should be aiming for in order to transform intellectually in an Islamic sense should be structured Islamic learning. Social media can never provide this, not to mention the fact that most Muslim ‘content creators’ are not qualified to be talking about much of Islam in the first place.

Spiritual growth is even worse when it comes to social media. Not only is the ‘Islamic content’ co-occuring with inappropriate & spiritually harmful content, but true spiritual transformation requires one to be in the company & tutelage of the righteous scholar who is connected to the Prophet SAW in their adab & understanding of Islam by way of isnad. It simply cannot happen by watching reels or Youtube videos. If you have trouble with conceiving this, think about it this way: you need a spiritual ‘coach’ or mentor just like the Companions RAD had the Prophet SAW. Consuming content online is simply NOT a substitute for that in any way.

If we want to transform intellectually & spiritually, we have to get off our phones, disconnect from ‘Islamic content’ and instead connect ourselves to qualified teachers whose understanding & implementation of Islam is descendant from the Prophet SAW himself. Anything else is delusion and deception.

Granted all this, there are Muslims on social media who have not drunk the ‘content creation’ algorithm-manipulating Kool-Aid and are qualified to be speaking about Islam and despite that are famous or popular anyways because of Allah’s Qadr, not because of any algorithm-gaming. Excellent examples of these that I have no qualms about promoting are Sh. Suhaib Webb, Ust. Hisham Abu Yusuf and Sh. Muhammad ibn Adam al-Kawthari.

---

Consumerism in Islamic Knowledge

---

As an educator, this one goes beyond my Islamic credentials & into my professional sensitivities. An educator understands more than anyone else in society about how human beings learn and intellectually and cognitively grow. A civilization or culture that values learning, values it’s teachers. A civilization or culture that dismisses it’s teachers is on the way to intellectual decline.

Thus one of the things that I despise most is consumerist, opportunist and exploitative products and services masquerading as education. These can take on many forms.

Conferences & celebrity speakers have a role – whether online or offline. But it is important to realize that conferences and Youtube feel-good talks are not education. They aren’t even spiritual tarbiyah. Their benefit is largely derived from the availability of an Islamic ‘social activity’ that brings the community together and fosters an Islamic culture and sense of belonging. But they are not education.

Intensives occupy a similar category. They have a role, but their function as education is going to be relatively weak. You can’t study something over 1-3 weeks and expect to remember it all. You’ll have to review.

What’s worse than conferences themselves is the bazaars within them. This is where conferences fail in their cultural output, in that they capitulate to consumerist culture while attempting to revitalize the Muslim’s communal spirit. These bazaars suffer from many of the problematic themes we have covered in the first section of this article, but also the music and inappropriate party-like environment of such events where everyone comes dressed in their finest and young men and women roam around looking for a ‘spouse’ dampens whatever good may be happening in the adjoining lecture hall or stage. It doesn’t help that more of these conferences are embedding ‘nasheed concerts’ into their programming, further encouraging that party-like atmosphere and further destroying the spiritual benefits of such an event.

Real education requires time, effort, work and some measure of assessment of learning. There is a reason why high school or a bachelors degree requires four years – with the latter being very specialized in a tiny niche of human knowledge. You cannot over-simplify knowledge because the very nature of knowledge is that it resists efforts to make it ‘easy’. It is always going to require time, effort and specialization. No amount of technology will change that.

As long as we understand this, all conferences, intensives and Youtube lectures have a role. They provide important learning and social-anchoring experiences for the average Muslim who is not a student of knowledge.

What I really want to address here however, are fluff books, courses and even programs. This one makes me angry, because it is a genuinely exploitative money-grab.

There are books being written (and in the age of AI, this is likely to get worse) that provide no substantial learning benefit for their reader. The author isn’t qualified to be writing about the subject, it’s all ‘feel-good’ content or people can get that information from a simple google search. The book was only written to be sold & bring in an income. Nothing else. It was not written as creative expression, intellectual contribution or social rectification.

Even worse than this are the courses which provide very basic or mediocre learning but market themselves as some sort of meaningful education. Giving children under the age of 12 a ‘certificate’ for learning how to pray salah is about as meaningful as giving them a ‘certificate’ for learning how to shoot a basketball through a hoop. I know this because I’ve had Grade 12 students in an Islamic school ask me questions about Wudu and prayer that they learned, practiced and were tested on – via paper and practicums – in Grade 9.

Even worse than this are entire Bachelors or Masters programs which waste valuable time and money of students teaching them little to nothing about the religion. One way to tell is if an Islamic Studies degree is all taught in English with no required Arabic learning at all. You’re not going to get anything useful out of such a program. You’re never going to learn much about Islam this way. They’re stealing your money. It’s simple. That Bachelors or Masters degree means nothing.

There is more beyond this that is too complicated to explain without making this an article about sound pedagogy, such as teaching students without a strong background in the Islamic Sciences about highly advanced, complicated and academic debates over history in Islamic theology. Not only is this not fruitful, but it’s outright dangerous

Real Islamic Knowledge vs. Fluffy, Feel-Good ‘Knowledge‘

It will be useful to consult my article on How to Study Islam, for more guidance here.

What is real ‘Islamic education’ then?

Firstly, it gives you what you need to learn that is appropriate, useful and beneficial for your level. It’s NOT just what feels good, what everyone is into, what a celebrity shaykh is teaching, or what’s being marketed in the best way. Real Islamic learning is intellectually and spiritually transformative, and should drastically change the way you perceive yourself, you religion and the universe we live in, instead of just catering to our personal opinions or society’s (or even worse, the government’s) perspective on what Islam should be like.

Second, if it’s claiming to take you to the level of a true seeker of knowledge, then Arabic MUST be a part of it. If it’s not forcing you to learn the language, then it has diluted itself for the sake of money, and has advertised itself to suit your consumerist tendency as a citizen in a Western consumerist society.

Third, if it’s real education, it might be boring at some points. It might require some work, and it might require you to be patient. It’s going to feel more like school and university and have some of the stress and dreariness that comes with it. Why? Because education & knowledge just have those features. If you dumb down education, you dumb down the person who goes through it. There are tons of quotes here from scholars of the past and experts in education from the present that are relevant, but that’s better saved for an independent article. Recently, Sh. Amin Kholwadia has written an excellent one.

Expecting Islamic learning to be easy, fluffy, intellectually diluted, catering to my needs and wants, fit to my schedule, spiritually comforting instead of spiritually challenging etc, is all a consumerist expectation of what Islamic learning should be like. We are expecting Islamic knowledge to be a commodity that’s going to give me the same adrenaline rush that attending a conference or shopping on Amazon does. But that’s just not the nature of learning & knowledge.

Support, participate in and encourage real Islamic learning. Sit at the feet of real scholars, and experience how Muslims have been learning for centuries. You might be surprised at the transformation that takes place in not just your life, but your understanding of the religion itself.

---

The Islamic Corporation

---

In the early 2000s, a curious phenomenon started. It was the Islamic corporation, where an organization would be started to fulfill an Islamic objective, but utilize the organization structure, sales strategies and marketing technique of a typical corporate entity in the West.

As with many phenomena in this article, again in itself this is not problem. In the West, incorporation is one of the main ways to run a business of any kind, Islamic or otherwise. However the issue becomes different when the lines between an Islamic organization and a capitalist corporate entity start to become blurred.

There are a number of different exemplars we could discuss here, but let’s focus on the Muslim charity for now.

Some Muslim charities are run responsibly, so I don’t want the average Muslim reading this to start generalizing to all organizations. However we must address the issue of when ‘sadaqah’ becomes a consumerist exercise. It’s no longer about the poor, but about obtaining something and filling a material or superficial ‘want’.

Charity organizations realize strategies which capitalize on a consumerist mindset work, like paying celebrities exorbitant amounts of money to do fundraisers. Unfortunately they work, as thousands of people attend these events for the sake of the celebrity, and the sadaqah effort becomes a lost intention in the corner of the subconscious. I attended such an event once, and when the celebrity didn’t show, people were visibly upset and even requested refunds. It’s bad enough that Muslims have this problem, what then of the ‘Islamic organization’ which feeds it?

What’s worse is when these celebrity speakers are problematic individuals, such as political activists who are poor representatives of Islamic morals, famous reciters who taken extremely problematic political positions in the Muslim world, or unqualified preachers who pretend like they’re muftis or scholars online. The main drive in all this is that the person is famous and loosely tied in some way to an ‘Islamic’ objective, and so their hiring and paying of massive amounts of money is justified in order to raise more money. But when I click on the button to give my zakat and sadaqah to this organization… do I intend to put that money into X celebrity’s pocket? What happens to my intention in that case? Is that still worship?

At some point in an Islamic corporation’s history, it’s initial vision as a service to the community fades and it’s organizational identity takes over. Like any other corporation, the initial vision becomes an organizational tool rather than an actual mission. The survival of the corporation becomes an equally important if not more important factor than the mission. This is why a good chunk of these Islamic corporations start looking for controversial, if not blatantly problematic loopholes in the Shariah in how they handle things like marketing, salaries, bonuses, Zakat distribution, celebrity speaker fees etc.

I have been made aware by friends working for these organizations how some of them have started to see each other as competition, and they hide ways of helping Muslims from each other so that they can have ‘exclusive’ access to give charity in some way to a cause and thus raise more money for their own organization.

How do we address this? The first thing I advise all Muslims to do – and I speak often in my classes about this – is to remove ourselves from the highly consumerist culture we have developed around sadaqah. Read the biographies of the Sahabah and how they gave sadaqah. Giving sadaqah was not a button they clicked on a website after entering their credit card (!) details. Rather they literally spent time with the poor as they fed and clothed them. When it comes to feeding the fasting person, Abdullah ibn Umar RAD would share his tablespread with the poor in Ramadan. Abu Bakr RAD (and in other variations of the story, Umar RAD) would disappear to cook, clean and serve and elderly blind Muslim woman in her home, and she had no idea who was helping her. This is the culture of sadaqah we need to have, not the highly transactional and consumerist one we have developed where our simple act of clicking a button on a website makes us feel relieved of any further ethical or spiritual obligation.

---

Distraction of the Means from Allah

---

All this may seem like rage-baiting, but it is a concern rooted in classical Tasawwuf. I have tried to present solutions and alternatives where I can. The verses in the Qur’an & Prophetic hadith on the dangers of wealth and how it distracts from Allah are well known.

What is less well known however, is how even righteous actions and outward righteousness can be a distraction from Allah too. This is addressed in Ibn Ata’illah’s first aphorism: One of the signs of relying on one’s own deeds is the loss of hope when a downfall occurs.

This aphorism is about how one can become distracted from Allah by their own righteous actions! How is this possible? Very simply, one becomes fixated on their own actions and start to forget who & what those actions are being done for in the first place. Our prayer becomes habit, our wudu becomes monotonous, our helping of others becomes secularized, and our trade & earning of income becomes materialistic. Slowly, we begin to rely on our deeds instead of Allah. When calamity hits, we don’t find the blessings of our deeds there to help us, because they were empty in the first place.

If this can happen with righteous deeds, then what about ‘righteous industry’? It’s as if we have introduced a second layer of distraction from Allah, on top of the delusion of our own actions. Participating in an ‘Islamic economy’, whether as a consumer or employee in an ‘Islamic corporation’ can be very deceptive, as it makes us feel ‘Muslim’. But feeling ‘Muslim’ is very different from being ‘Muslim’, which is submission & obedience to Allah & His Messenger in their commands & prohibitions. Being ‘Muslim’ is also very different from ‘Ihsan’, which is to truly be connected to Allah to the point that we worship Him ‘as if we can see Him’.