Ramadan Reflections #3: When the Heart Already Knows
🌙 Ramadan Reflections is a series of short essays where reading turns into practice, and ideas get tested against the heart.
Some disbelief is not caused by “lack of proof.” It is caused by arrogance. Not always the loud kind, either. The quiet kind that says, I see what is true… but I will not submit. Ramadan has a way of exposing that sentence inside the chest.
The strange kind of “sober”
A person can be intelligent, functional, and perfectly “sober”… and still be heedless. Not because the heart cannot recognize, but because the ego refuses to bow. That is why arrogance is so dangerous. It does not only produce sins. It produces denial. It trains the heart to look at clear signs and say, “It is nothing.”
When the heart ignores what it already knows
There are questions that do not need a long debate. They only need a moment of honesty.
For example, if you found a needle on the ground, you would not say, “This made itself.” Even though the metal exists, and the world is full of raw material, your mind instantly knows: this has been designed precisely, so it must have a designer.
Now here is the uncomfortable part. We apply that logic to small things, but then we suspend it for the biggest thing we will ever face: an entire universe filled with order.
Even in daily life we live by this rule. If a phone, a watch, or a key suddenly appeared on your desk, you would not call it “nature.” You would ask, “Who put this here?” So why do we look at sight, hearing, memory, and a beating heart, and say, “It is nothing… it is random… it is just how it is”?
And there is another question that hits me hard: if “nature” is the creator, why can it not recreate? When a species disappears, nature does not bring it back. When something breaks, nature does not restore it to its original design. But Allah can create, and Allah can recreate.
The point is not to win an argument. The point is to reveal something: the heart already recognizes the truth, but the ego argues because it does not want to submit.
The Ramadan mirror
This is where Ramadan becomes personal. Because the same arrogance that rejects Allah can live in smaller forms inside the believer.
“I know this is from Allah… but I want to take credit.”
“I know I should change… but not yet.”
“I know I was wrong… but I will not admit it.”
Arrogance is the refusal to return.
A short practice
Next time you feel the urge to explain away a clear truth, pause for a second. Notice what is happening inside: is it really a lack of evidence… or is it the ego resisting surrender?
Then try this simple duʿā:
“O Allah, make me humble enough to accept what I already know.”
Because guidance is not only about information. It is about surrender. And the first door to surrender is humility.
Series: Ramadan Reflections
Reading reference: What the Sober-Carefree (Heedless Ones) Say to the Carefree-Sober (Believers), Knowing Oneself, Knowing God