The Magic of Ramadan
Ramadan has always been the month when I step away from everything and take time to reflect on my life.
At its core, that's what Ramadan is about. It's a month where, as Muslims, we sit with ourselves, reflect on our actions, and reassess the decisions we've made throughout the year.
But Ramadan 2026 felt different.
The reason was simple. I had just walked away from social media altogether as both a creator and a startup founder. I had spent years relying on social media to build my business. Even the business itself was rushed. It was my dream project, but I launched it earlier than I should have because I thought I was going to get married, and I believed the business would give us financial freedom as a couple.
That marriage wasn't written for me.
So after one of the most exhausting years of my life, emotionally and mentally, I desperately needed Ramadan. I've already shared the social media part of the story in previous posts.
My plan for the month was very clear.
No phone.
No human contact except with my family.
No going outside except for the mosque.
No entertainment.
No chess.
No hobbies.
No guitar.
No books except the Quran.
Just the Quran, a brand new notebook that I had made with my own hands, and me sitting alone, trying to sort out every part of my life.
I'm not going to lie.
The first three to five days were incredibly difficult.
I had become addicted to chess and entertainment, so going from that to a complete hard reset overnight was painful. You suddenly realize how long a single day actually is. SubhanAllah, the days felt endless.
But after that first week, I adapted to the rhythm.
Eventually, I actually fell in love with that lifestyle because, for the first time in years, I genuinely felt calm.
Peaceful.
Like nothing was chasing me anymore.
Before that, I was always rushing, always fighting, always obsessing over the next goal.
But during that first week of Ramadan, I experienced a level of peace I honestly don't think I've felt since I was a child.
My mind was finally quiet.
One thing that helped me even more was stumbling across a Pinterest post that introduced me to a concept called Tazkiyat An Nafs, or Soul Purification.
The Quran describes three states of the soul.
An Nafs Al Ammarah.
An Nafs Al Lawwamah.
And An Nafs Al Mutma'innah.
An Nafs Al Ammarah is the ego. It's the part of you that constantly pulls you toward desires, excess, and sin.
An Nafs Al Lawwamah is your conscience. It's the voice that makes you hold yourself accountable.
If you let your ego dominate, you slowly become consumed by arrogance, blind to your flaws, and distracted by this dunya. That's not what Allah wants for us.
But the opposite extreme isn't healthy either.
If your conscience completely takes over, you begin doubting yourself all the time. You constantly second guess every decision, and over time that turns into fear and hesitation.
Islam teaches balance.
We're supposed to train our ego so that it commands us toward good, while allowing our conscience to remind us whenever we start drifting toward our desires or bad actions.
That balance is what leads to An Nafs Al Mutma'innah, the peaceful soul.
The process of continuously refining your soul and paying attention to your inner self is called Tazkiyah.
If I had written all those Arabic names in Arabic script, this post would've been impossible to read, so bear with me.
That's what I tried to dedicate myself to during Ramadan.
Even though I had decided to completely avoid interacting with people, there was one thing I knew I had to do.
I spent a day sending messages to everyone who had been part of my life over the past few years.
Some were people I no longer spoke to.
Some were still close friends.
I asked every single one of them to forgive me for anything I may have done, for the sake of Allah.
I wanted to clean my soul before anything else.
The rest of Ramadan passed in complete peace.
When Ramadan ended, I'm not going to lie, I felt like I had just completed Umrah or Hajj.
I felt light.
It felt like my soul had come back to life.
The version of myself that I thought I had lost finally returned.
Everything was back in Allah's hands, and I was genuinely at peace with that.
After that beautiful month, life started looking so much simpler than I had made it.
We complicate things far more than we need to.
I realized that life is actually very simple.
If you have a job or a small business that provides for you, a place to live, family and friends who love you and whom you love, you're committed to your prayers and worship, and you spend your life trying to do good, then Wallahi, it's as if you've already been given both this Dunia and Akhirah.
No one to please except Allah.
No one to seek validation from except Allah.
No one to chase except Allah's mercy.
That's when the dunya stays in your hands instead of your heart.
Alhamdulillah for the blessing of Ramadan.
The beautiful part is that when Ramadan ended, I didn't simply go back to my old habits.
It genuinely felt like I had installed a new identity.
Using my phone less became normal.
Worrying about the future became less frequent.
Doing good for myself, for my family, for my close friends, and even for my little Nhance community became my default way of living.
Speaking of Nhance, I honestly don't know whether I'll continue that project.
It was my dream startup and a problem I genuinely wanted to solve.
But I rushed its launch because I believed it would become the foundation for the life I thought I was about to build with the woman I intended to marry.
In the end, I no longer had the mental bandwidth to keep pushing it forward.
It requires a lot of money, a lot of resources, and a tremendous amount of effort.
More importantly, the reason I dreamed about building it in the first place no longer exists.
It doesn't make sense to keep chasing a dream that no longer has the same purpose, at least not right now.
Maybe one day I'll revisit it with a different idea.
Especially now that AI has completely changed the landscape of our industry, even the problem Nhance was originally built to solve may no longer exist.
Anyway, maybe I'll tell the full Nhance story in another post.
For now, I'm simply grateful for everything that happened over the past few months.
Ramadan remains the greatest opportunity to become a new person, to rediscover the true path to Allah, and to finally see this dunya for what it really is.
May Allah guide all of us toward goodness.