Muntazir Ali
Not long ago, I wrote about the removal of hundreds of titles from the U.S. Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library in Annapolis and the concerns raised by JUI (F) Lower Chitral leadership about books donated by Lakshan Bibi. I placed these acts of erasure and refusal alongside a moment from my classroom – a seminar on the Quran, where we explored ecological questions through the lens of scripture.
In that space, I contended, differences in exposure, religious persuasion, and cultural inclinations did not provoke defensiveness or disengagement. Instead, they served as an opportunity to listen deeply, probe empathetically, and hold complexity. And yet, what I often find myself going back to is not only the richness of that encounter but how fragile it felt – how much effort it took to arrive there. Because beneath the surface of thoughtful discussion was another quieter but more telling struggle: that of reading itself, of staying with the text long enough for it to speak.
I’ve repeatedly witnessed the same quiet tension across the courses I’ve taught. Whether we are reading Quranic passages, Sufi treatises, novels, or historiographic texts, my students often find themselves overwhelmed, not by the ideas, but by the form. A paragraph feels too long, a page insurmountable. Reading – slow, sustained, open to ambiguity – has become a less familiar practice. And yet these same students, despite the challenges, are curious, intelligent, and deeply invested in the questions we explore together. It is not a lack of will that holds them back. It is the conditions of truncated attention in which we all find ourselves.
Reading, which invites patience or demands abstraction, is becoming a lost art. The habits required to engage with a novel, a philosophical argument, or a scriptural commentary – such as lingering, re-reading, and dwelling in contradiction – run counter to the way our phones and feeds are built. Social media rewards instant reactions, not contemplative inquiry. The phone-sized paragraph has become the default unit of meaning. What does not fit within that frame increasingly slips away, not with protest but exhaustion.
This shift is both a classroom problem and a life problem, especially for teachers in the interpretive humanities. We’re no longer simply introducing students to new content. We ask them to relate to time, attention, and meaning in different ways. In short, we are trying to cultivate an endangered capacity: the ability to stay with a text long enough for it to shape us.
This transformation didn’t happen overnight. Scholars like Maryanne Wolf (Reader, Come Home), Nicholas Carr (The Shallows), and Jonathan Crary (24/7) have traced how digital technologies rewire our neurological and cultural expectations. Wolf reminds us that the reading brain is not a fixed entity – it adapts. As we train it to skim headlines, parse hashtags, and absorb meaning through flickering fragments, it begins to resist the very forms of thinking that once defined ethical and intellectual life.
But the consequences are not just cognitive. They encompass moral, political, and even spiritual aspects. Reading deeply is a practice in ethical imagination. The novel teaches us to live inside someone else’s interiority. A theological treatise or historical text teaches us to entertain competing visions of truth. Sufi treatises invite us to imagine alternate worlds. Like many sacred texts, the Quran is not structured for linear consumption. Its meaning thickens each time we circle back. Itdemands that we slow down, linger with discomfort, and let metaphor and rhythm do their quiet work. And therein lies its force.
When students can no longer stay with a paragraph, something more than comprehension is at stake. We risk losing the conditions that foster humility, empathy, and critical thinking.
So what can we do?
In my classrooms, I’ve tried a range of experiments. These range from slowing down the syllabus to annotating aloud, writing about a single sentence rather than a whole chapter, to deliberate and measured pauses, strategic re-readings, and curated moments of silence before the labor of interpretation. Some of these practices help. Others, not so much. However, all underscore that reading has to be cultivated deliberately, perhaps more explicitly,as a form of resistance.
We cannot simply assume that students or anyone still know how to read. The very premise of higher education rests on a faculty we are rapidly losing. And while it’s easy to place blame on TikTok or the latest app, the deeper issue is systemic. Our digital infrastructures are designed to fragment attention and flatten complexity. We live inside machines built to erode the capacities that reading once nurtured.
And yet, despite all this, my students show up. They try. They want to read. They want to think. And sometimes, when the conditions are right, something happens. That seminar on the Quran and the environment didn’t begin with clarity. It started in hesitation—in the struggle to parse verses, endure repetition, and ask what stewardship means when time itself feels stolen. But by the end, we had entered a different time-space, shaped by slowness, shared inquiry, and a willingness to harness difference.
That willingness is no small thing. It may, in fact, be the most important thing we can teach. Because in a world that forces us to scroll and forget, to react and move on, engaging deeply with texts, ideas, and one another is not just a skill – it’s a necessity. It’s a form of radical hope. With me, so far? Let’s convert inspiration into practice: Choose one long-form article this week and set a 20-minute timer to read it – phone facedown.
(The writer teaches religion, history, and literature at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro).