The Fragility of Values and the Weak Immunity of Faith: When Religion is Reduced to Entertainment and Transformed into a Commodity

italiatelegraph

* Dr. Abdellah Chanfaar

How did the chemistry of religion turn into a commodity in the entertainment market, and how did the nation start exchanging its civilizational defeat for illusory victories on social media platforms? Since when has faith been measured by the number of likes, interactions, and the sharing of trivialities? And since when have we celebrated and cheered whenever a singer, football player, or non-Muslim converts to Islam, as if we were winning in a symbolic game?
In an era controlled by platform algorithms, where religion is hijacked into the entertainment market, the nation is now trading its sense of defeat for a handful of viral videos trending on the “trend” list, and for the echo of electronic chants glorifying illusory victories. But behind this noise lies a deep wound: the fragility of values, the weakness of faith’s immunity, and a collective deception within a system that reproduces our surrender while we think we are victorious…
How did religion, which came to liberate people, become merely an entertainment consumed in a time of hegemony? Why do we delude ourselves with power whenever we hear a singer recite, while the foundations of true civilizational action collapse within us?
– From Religion as a Message to Religion as Entertainment: The Manufacturing of Spectacular Piety:
In the age of cultural globalization and systems of symbolic subjugation, religion has ceased to be a project for liberation and self-building, and has instead become material for entertainment consumption, re-produced within a global market. Islam is reduced to a video clip, and faith is tested by how much a platform interacts with a fleeting scene.
When people saw American singer Jennifer Grout recite Ayat al-Kursi, virtual spaces were filled with calls for victory, glorification, and chants, as if Islam, in which societies have been collapsing civilizationally, was suddenly restored in a recitational scene created by others and distributed by platform algorithms. Thus, the Muslim now measures the victory of his religion by the size of the electronic noise, not by the scale of the civilizational project built by the sweat of thinkers, the struggle of educators, and the work of reformers.
– Fragility of Values: When Collective Consciousness is Defeated by the Machinery of Hegemony:
What we witness is not a fleeting amazement, but the result of a long process of draining religion of its liberating essence, transforming it into a cultural commodity marketed within the global attention economy. The hegemony system has infiltrated the depths of the religious sphere, turning Islam from a religion that liberates peoples into a spectacle consumed by the masses. When a Westerner converts to Islam, the event turns into a viral product, invested in feelings of false superiority, which numbs the sense of deep civilizational defeat.
Thus, a hollow popular religiosity is re-produced, enslaved to symbols and visual scenes, which produces neither social strength nor a liberating project.
– False Superiority: A Defensive Mechanism That Hides the Sense of Defeat:
The danger of these phenomena lies not in their superficiality but in the fact that they reveal the fragility of values and the weakness of intellectual immunity within our societies. The hegemony system, through the tools of media, culture, and technology, has succeeded in implanting a form of religiosity that does not produce action but is invested in solidifying surrender to entertainment and momentary amazement.
The one who glorifies and cheers today for the conversion of so-and-so, or some celebrity, is the same one who turns a blind eye to the structural crises afflicting his nation: from corruption and the subordination of elites to the erosion of education, health, social, economic, and infrastructural systems, and the degeneration of religious discourse into a tool for agitation and incitement, rather than building.
When the verse “You are the best nation” becomes a slogan for boasting rather than a call to bear the responsibility of testimony, it reveals a psychological defense mechanism that compensates for a deep sense of defeat and inadequacy. False superiority over others, and interpreting epidemics as punishments for nations, is but an expression of lost self-confidence.
Civilizational action has been replaced by gratuitous hostility towards others, serving in the end those who re-produce nations drowning in primal reactions, far from rational action.
– Immunity of Faith Between Symbolic Consumption and Self-Building:
When Islam is reduced to images and scenes marketed in entertainment, it turns into fragile symbolic capital that cannot withstand the winds of globalization reshaping minds. Faith’s immunity is not built from recitational clips or moments of amazement but from an integrated educational project that restores value to reason, renews the connection to values, and energizes the soul with the spirit of liberation and action.
Tying the strength of faith to the fate of a singer or an athlete brings the nation into the illusion of marketing, where religion turns into an advertising label rather than a driving force in history.
– Cultural Hegemony as a Redrawing of Religious Boundaries:
These phenomena can only be understood within the context of the cultural hegemony system, which redefines the boundaries of popular religiosity in terms of consumption, not construction. Platforms that market and amplify these clips are not innocent; they operate on a capitalist logic, viewing religion as a profitable material, as long as it is emptied of its liberating energy.
Thus, the spectacular Islam is re-produced instead of the resistant Islam, invested in the triviality of religiosity rather than diving into the depths of its liberating objectives.
– What Kind of Islam Do We Want in the Age of Hegemony?
We stand at a crossroads: either we continue consuming religious spectacles as entertainment and live the illusions of symbolic victories, or we restore Islam as a project for building the self and society.
We want an Islam that reclaims its civilizational message, producing a new role model: the model of good action, deep thought, and beauty that changes life, not just dazzles the moment.
We want to search for thinkers and scholars who rejected the religious marketing game and insisted on building a liberating discourse, restoring the dignity of the Muslim as an active agent in history, not a spectator of carefully programmed scenes.
Will we remain prisoners of the simplification system that exploits our fragility? How long will we pay the price of our weak immunity, in an era where battles for controlling minds intensify? And do we have the courage and audacity to redefine religion, not as a commodity, but as a comprehensive liberation project that breaks the chains of hegemony and rearranges values in favor of humanity, not the market?

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