Time, Virtuality, and the Digital Sacred

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Fatima Tariq can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/time-virtuality-and-the-digital-sacred/. About the post: The above scene from Ramy (Season 2, Episode 7) depicts an absurd yet moving moment featuring characters Mo and Ahmed performing umrah through VR headsets. As Mo embraces the virtual Ka’aba, he tearfully breaks down; we see a performance of embodied devotion through his digitally mediated umrah experience. While VR pilgrimages remain niche and laughable to many, their use by some travel agencies and religious groups to practice for actual pilgrimage highlights how digital technologies are reshaping sacred journeys. This project attempts to interrogate how digital mediation transforms spatiotemporal logics of religious practice particularly through the lens of chronotope (Bakhtin 1981, Agha 2007), the co-constituion of time and space in narrative and interaction. Linguistic anthropology’s concept of chronotope may help us unpack this tension.