In Season 2 of the show Ramy<\/em>, two Muslim American men perform umrah (the minor pilgrimage to Mecca) while sitting in an Atlantic City hotel room. Ramy <\/em>is known for its bold and subversive humor in the way it addresses Muslim American identity and experiences. In this episode, two of his friends\u00a0wear VR headsets. One of them, Mo, tearfully embraces the wallpaper, which his goggles have transformed into the Ka\u2019ba, Islam\u2019s holiest site. His friend Ahmed whispers, \u201cIt\u2019s a miracle, subhanallah,\u201d then adds, \u201cand you don\u2019t have to worry about your sandals getting stolen at the haram!\u201d<\/p>\n Ahmed\u2019s joke about germs and stolen sandals acknowledges the absurdity. Mo\u2019s tears\u2014while also absurd\u2014demand that we take the scene a bit more seriously. Can a pixelated Ka\u2018ba elicit immanence (divine copresence) or does it mostly just parody a sacred ritual? If time resists digitization even as space becomes malleable (McGlotten 2013, 46), and \u201ctime is not a semiotic isolate\u201d (Agha, 2007, 320) how might the concept of chronotope, the intrinsic connection between time and space be useful in thinking about religious practice and the digital? Through this seemingly absurd example of a VR pilgrimage, we might better understand the notion of chronotope as it relates to the digital and how, through affect and copresence, the sacred becomes immanent (and perhaps transcendent) in new configurations, even as time \u201cresists\u201d digitization.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Mo (Amer), embracing wallpaper in the Atlantic City hotel room while on a virtual reality \u02bfumrah to Mecca, Ramy, Season 2, Episode 7, 2020. From: PLATFORM: \u02bfUmrah in Atlantic City: The Representation of Muslim-American Space in Ramy <\/p>\n<\/div>\n In Season 2 of the show Ramy<\/em>, two Muslim American men perform umrah (the minor pilgrimage to Mecca) while sitting in an Atlantic City hotel room. They wear VR headsets. One of them, Mo, tearfully embraces the wallpaper, which his goggles have transformed into the Ka\u2019ba, Islam\u2019s holiest site. His friend Ahmed whispers, \u201cIt\u2019s a miracle, subhanallah,\u201d then adds, \u201cand you don\u2019t have to worry about your sandals getting stolen at the haram!\u201d<\/p>\n Ahmed\u2019s joke about germs and stolen sandals acknowledges the absurdity. Mo\u2019s tears\u2014while also absurd\u2014demand that we take the scene a bit more seriously. Can a pixelated Ka\u2018ba elicit immanence (divine copresence) or does it mostly just parody a sacred ritual? If time resists digitization even as space becomes malleable (McGlotten 2013, 46), and \u201ctime is not a semiotic isolate\u201d (Agha, 2007, 320) how might the concept of chronotope, the intrinsic connection between time and space be useful in thinking about religious practice and the digital? Through this seemingly absurd example of a VR pilgrimage, we might better understand the notion of chronotope as it relates to the digital and how, through affect and copresence, the sacred becomes immanent (and perhaps transcendent) in new configurations, even as time \u201cresists\u201d digitization.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Ahmed (with VR headset): \u201cIt\u2019s a miracle, subhanallah\u201d<\/span> I want to think through this scene with help from several scholars. Shaka McGlotten\u2019s (2006) work on queer virtuality through his autoethnographic research about dating apps helps us understand how intimacy operates as a force that exceeds normative scripts, producing forms of connection that are both excessive and unpredictable (including the \u201cfailure\u201d of digital pilgrimage). Aisha Beliso-De Jes\u00fas developed the concept of \u201ccopresence\u201d in relation to her practice and study of Santer\u00eda (2015); it refers to the felt, embodied multiplicity of beings present in, on, and around the body and affords us a way to take Mo\u2019s tears seriously while holding space for the scene\u2019s absurdity. Copresences are sensed through chills, shivers, premonitions, and yes\u2014tears. They are felt in the body. Mo\u2019s body in that hotel room, for example, becomes a site for sacred copresence. Agha (2007) and Das (2008) offer linguistic anthropological tools for understanding these phenomena: Agha shows how mediated interactions produce \u201crecombinant\u201d selves across multiple chronotopes, while Das shows how diasporic Tamil communities in Montreal \u201creformat\u201d time-space rules by scaling linguistic and social boundaries to stake claims about their identities. The VR umrah similarly reformats the pilgrimage chronotope, compressing spatial distance while maintaining temporal distance.<\/span> Media and digital anthropology have long examined how technologies reformat social practices and power structures. In religious contexts, digital platforms can destabilize notions of presence, belonging, and divine encounter. In <\/span>V<\/span>irtual Intimacies <\/span><\/em>(2013, 11), McGlotten frames the virtual as a site of \u201cimmanence\u201d or a \u201cstructure of feeling\u201d where intimacy operates as a \u201ccontact zone of psychic, social, and political energies.\u201d For McGlotten, intimacy is \u201calways already virtual\u201d: it names the connection itself, the feeling of belonging or nonbelonging, of being touched or left untouched.<\/span><\/p>\n McGlotten draws on Deleuze\u2019s concept of immanence or the idea that the divine isn\u2019t transcendent, hovering above everyday life, but immanent, or folded into it. This may be different from how many Muslims might understand divine immanence, where Allah\u2019s presence is both transcendent as well as immanent. But the overlap here is generative in that both of these frameworks locate the sacred within and through affective experience to some extent.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In <\/span>Ramy<\/span><\/em>,<\/em> Mo\u2019s tears index an affective intensity that suggests digital immanence: the VR Ka\u02bfba, though simulated, elicits a kind of embodied devotion. McGlotten\u2019s concept of queer virtuality further supports this, proposing that digital encounters always expand rather than diminish intimacy (p. 11).\u00a0 This expansion of virtuality and intimacy through digital chronotopes occurs through affect. VR does not introduce mediation where there completely was none but rather alters its form. The Atlantic City hotel room in <\/span>Ramy<\/span><\/em> becomes an unexpectedly sacred space: materially mundane (or even profane) yet affectively charged. The humor in Mo and Ahmed\u2019s exchange (\u201cHajj with all the germs?\u201d) acknowledges the presence of VR\u2019s artifice while acknowledging what it offers relief from. As McGlotten notes, intimacy is somewhat \u201cscripted\u201d by \u201cdiverse and sometimes contradictory\u201d power relations like the technological, economic and religious infrastructures that enable VR umrah.<\/span><\/p>\n The VR headset contracts physical distance but cannot replicate the sensorial affective valences of umrah in Mecca\u2014the feeling of crowds of people whose shoulders press against yours, the warmth of the bright desert sun in the morning or the coolness of the nights with giant beams of floodlight coming from overhead, the sound of people reciting prayers, the glare of phone screens with Facetime calls or prayer apps open. As Mo embraced the Ka\u2019ba, he may have felt his skin pressed against the virtual Ka\u2019ba\/Atlantic city hotel wallpaper, but he did not feel the velvety black fabric or take in its actual rosewater musk scent. And yet, Mo\u2019s visceral reaction suggests that the feeling of connection transcends the medium\u2019s constraints. It still seemed to be a moment of humility, gratitude and deep connection to God.<\/span><\/p>\n Pilgrimage in Mecca is mediated by crowds, by distance, by the limits of bodies that can\u2019t always press through to touch the Ka\u2019aba, or the black stone (a sacred relic). VR expands this mediation but also helps us remember that affect is the throughline when it comes to religious practice and that sacred presence materializes through practices of attention, orientation, and affect. A sajdaga is another example of space-travel similar to VR (Ahmad, personal communication, 2025). A sajdaga is a small clay tablet that Shia Muslims often use during daily prayers. These tablets are usually made from soil taken from Karbala, the site of Hussain\u2019s martyrdom. When a Muslim presses their forehead to that clay, they are touching a place that is both physically elsewhere and spiritually here. The timing of the prayer remains contingent on the position of the sun in the sky, but the tablet transports a person across place through this ritual.<\/span><\/p>\n Both VR technology and sajdagas are technologies of sacred mobility and presence, though one is digitized and the other is analog. Digital intimacy is linked to past social practices. Networks are \u201csystems of interconnectivity\u201d but also \u201csymbols for, or actual embodiments of, real world power and control\u201d (p. 6). Digital intimacy is also not inherently liberatory; it exists within larger structures that shape possibilities for connection and exclusion (p. 49). It is embedded in broader anxieties about technology disrupting \u201cnormal\u201d life and older versions of ritual practices.<\/span><\/p>\n Beliso-De Jes\u00fas writes about what she calls \u201ctechnorituals\u201d or the use of media technologies as extensions of ritual space. In her work on Santer\u00eda, she notes that \u201cspirits like screens.\u201d Video is a conductor for the orisha\u2019s energy. Similarly, the VR headset in the <\/span>Ramy<\/span><\/em> example is a conductor for divine presence, affective intensity, or a kind of divine co-presence. The binary between \u201cin-person\u201d and \u201cdigital\u201d collapses through affect.<\/span><\/p>\n Mikhail Bakhtin\u2019s concept of chronotope describes the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships. Traditional umrah is deeply chronotopic in that it is anchored to Mecca\u2019s fixed coordinates, tied to lunar time, and entered through the ritually-specific physical state of ihram. VR umrah disentangles the ritual from those chronotopic coordinates. Mo and Ahmed perform it anywhere and anytime.<\/span><\/p>\n But time resists digitization in ways that space does not. As McGlotten puts it, \u201centering into a virtual world does not also mean one enters a virtual, otherworldly time even if the experience of time appears to contract or expand. A day does not suddenly become twenty-six hours, and there are only so many hours a day in which one can play the game\u201d (2013, 46). Space bends in VR. Time holds firm. Mo\u2019s tears occur in real time, as real as any pilgrim\u2019s tears in Mecca. The hotel room\u2019s \u201cnow\u201d and the Ka\u2019ba\u2019s present coexist in tension.<\/span><\/p>\n Beliso-De Jes\u00fas\u2019s concept of copresence helps us sit with this tension. Copresences, she writes, \u201cundo linearity and show up in the form of a past that is not past.\u201d They traverse time. The Ka\u2019ba is both a historical site and a living presence. Mo\u2019s VR headset lets him see the Ka\u2019ba, but it cannot transport him to Mecca\u2019s time, the rhythm of communal worship, of collective effervescence. He is stuck in Atlantic City\u2019s time, even as he virtually moves through Mecca\u2019s space.<\/span><\/p>\n Linguistic anthropology offers tools for understanding this process with greater precision. Agha (2007) shows that chronotopic representations are always experienced within participation frameworks, and that mass-mediated chronotopes create \u201crecombinant selves\u201d through cross-chronotope alignments (326-327). Mo\u2019s VR experience is an example of a recombinant self; his diasporic Muslim self remains in Atlantic City while his affect is oriented toward Mecca. Das (2008) adds that ideologies and practices are \u201creformatted\u201d through spatiotemporal scaling and the boundaries between linguistic forms, interlocutors, and contexts (2). The VR umrah reformats the chronotope of pilgrimage, compressing spatial distance while maintaining temporal distance.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Beliso-De Jes\u00fas rethinks diaspora as an assemblage with a focus on connections, disruptions, intensities, and feelings. Diasporas are shaped by power, by money, by racial and sexual politics. Thinking with the concept of assemblages helps us see intensities, conflicts and contradictions.<\/span><\/p>\n The <\/span>Ramy <\/span><\/em>scene is a kind of diasporic assemblage. It brings together Atlantic City, Mecca, VR technology, Muslim American identity, and the specific histories of pilgrimage as a practice shaped by colonialism, capitalism, and transnational mobility. Mo and Ahmed\u2019s VR umrah is a messy, mediated, and politically charged encounter.<\/span><\/p>\n McGlotten\u2019s concept of \u201cfailure\u201d is useful here. This kind of VR umrah experience remains absurd or blasphemous for many to think about because of its lack of chronotypic accuracy, but even this perceived \u201cfailure\u201d still shapes religious tradition and experience. McGlotten reframes failure as a productive force that generates alternative forms of connection and relationality. Beliso-De Jes\u00fas might add that copresence does not require spatial accuracy. The orisha are present on screens; the Ka\u2019ba can \u201cbe present\u201d in a hotel room. While finances, anti-Muslim and anti-Shia visa regimes remain significant barriers for Muslims to perform Hajj or umrah, there have also been calls for boycotting Hajj, the mandatory pilgrimage. In the current political climate, where Saudi Arabia benefits from Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza, perhaps boycotts or an intentional \u201cfailure\u201d to perform umrah or Hajj (minor and major pilgrimages) in this sense, is also a form of the sacred.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n While this article would have benefitted from an engagement with Islamic legalities on virtual pilgrimage, it aims to provide insight from the perspective of\u00a0embodied experience<\/span>. McGlotten invites us to theorize online intimacy as a set of affective, political, and embodied relations that emerge through failure, friction, and the unpredictable force of the virtual.\u00a0 Beliso-De Jes\u00fas writes that Santer\u00eda\u2019s copresence is nontranscendental and that spirits are in the body, the screens, and the smells. <\/span>Linguistic anthropology sharpens this inquiry, helping us see how the \u201cfracturing\u201d of chronotopes through VR, or other digital technologies is a kind of scalar reformatting of participation frameworks; while holding space for the affective conditions for sacred copresence (Agha 2007, Das 2008).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Perhaps the question is not whether VR pilgrimage is \u201creal\u201d but rather what it reveals about the structures that shape our access to the sacred. The encounter is messy, mediated and technopolitically charged. Beliso-De Jes\u00fas asks us to center African diasporic religion, to reject theories of mediation based on Christian models of transcendence, and to take copresence seriously as a felt, embodied reality. VR pilgrimage, in its absurdity and its sincerity, asks us to do something similar for a Muslim diasporic digital practice. <\/span>How might this example of virtual pilgrimage help us think more generally about questions of diasporic belonging, racialized access, and religious authority as religious practices of all sorts become more technologically mediated? <\/span>How might <\/span>digital chronotopes require a rethinking of how space, time, personhood and affect co-constitute sacred experience<\/span>? The screen makes immanence differently real. And that difference, with all its frictions and failures, is worth paying attention to.<\/span><\/p>\n Special thanks to Multimodal Contributing Editor<\/span> Seon Shim, <\/span><\/a>who curated this post and to\u00a0Contributing Editor<\/span> Misria Shaik Ali <\/span><\/a>for their thoughtful comments. Thank you as well to Prof. Gabriel Dattatreyan for his comments on an early draft of this piece, which emerged from a final paper for his Digital Cultures class at NYU.<\/p>\n Agha, Asif. 2007. \u201cRecombinant Selves in Mass Mediated Spacetime.\u201d Language & Communication 27 (3): 320\u201335.<\/span><\/cite><\/p>\n Bakhtin, M. M. 1981.\u00a0 <\/span>The Dialogic Imagination<\/span><\/i> . University of Texas Press.<\/span><\/cite><\/p>\n Beliso-De Jes\u00fas, Aisha M. 2015.\u00a0 <\/span>Electric Santer\u00eda: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion<\/span><\/i> . Columbia University Press.<\/span><\/cite><\/p>\n Das, Sonia Neela. 2008. \u201cBetween Convergence and Divergence: Reformatting Language Purism in the Montreal Tamil Diasporas.\u201d Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 18 (1): 1\u201323.<\/span><\/cite><\/p>\n McGlotten, Shaka. 2013.\u00a0 <\/span>Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality<\/span><\/i> . SUNY Press.<\/span><\/cite><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"A](\"http:\/\/blog.castac.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/08\/mo-umrah-vr.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
<\/span>Mo (with VR headset): \u201cSubhanallah indeed, and you don\u2019t have to worry about your sandals getting stolen at the haram\u201d<\/span>
<\/span>Ahmed: \u201cHajj with all the germs? I can really come around to this\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/span><\/p>\nIntimacy, Virtuality, Immanence<\/h2>\n
Pilgrimage Is Always Mediated<\/h2>\n
Chronotope and the Limits of Virtuality<\/h2>\n
Diasporic Assemblages and \u201cFailure\u201d<\/h2>\n
Affect as the Throughline<\/h2>\n
Notes<\/h2>\n
References<\/strong><\/h2>\n