Young Muslim men online are now subject to a “scam call center” model of the internet attention economy. Those with the strongest memories in what I always endearingly called the “Alt Muslim” space remember that after the COVID pandemic, there was finally a real chance for reflection on the horrific mistakes of our community leaders and influencers, both online and offline, through the past two decades of the 9/11 era. It was clear due to the social trends of the time, of gynoslavery and racial political hysteria, as well as the spineless mass reaction to the COVID disease itself, that Muslims in both East and West were entirely lost on the “young man” question, and in many cases didn’t even know there was a question. Those of us with more perception at least wanted out, outside of the impotent track of education and community building for makeup laden mosque-hijabis whilst their male counterparts were left, sometimes literally, in the dust.
It was this feeling and long-term decay I noticed that motivated me to start Qawwam Magazine (soon to return), in the summer of 2023. I genuinely felt at the time that I had brought around me a great group of online friends and acquaintances who believed in a model of Online Islam that was to be the opposite of what the Red Pill space had become.
The “Red Pill” movement, around 2016 when Trump was elected, was still no more than a niche collection of forum posters’ most prolific writers on women and relationships. What TRP/Manosphere guys were saying in unison was at the time seemingly groundbreaking stuff — that Millennial and Gen Z men were growing up believing in a fantastical sexual marketplace that didn’t exist, and ought to gain some realism and “game” on the topic of what women wanted if they were to gain any success in love and romance. These prolific accounts gained a big following and growing notoriety up until a few years later when the most entreprenurial around them invented what we know commonly now as the “online course” business model. It’s all but dead now, of course, but Andrew Tate built his initial fame on this exact platform, years before he went mega-viral in the summer of 2022.
Because of the sheer lucrativity of this model, every big account in the TRP space followed suit, and by the time the pandemic hit, the entire space had become a civil war of grifting scam artists who invented controversies and purity tests out of thin air to reel in as many young fools to their specific strain (and courses) as possible. Think of it like a gay, secular, female-brain obsessed version of kharijism, where each firqa calls the other a kafir over trivial topics that only grow dumber with time.
Then, the model changed. It went from just courses to “mens groups,” and post-pandemic it became our current streamer culture for young Gen Z guys. There’s too much to be said about the history of this culture war stupidity, and it blows me away no honest Ron Jonson type writer or journalist, especially a Muslim, has written it’s history in full, but this is the gist of it: what started as a genuine and valuable consortium of open-source content for the benefit and advancement of young men became a mass scam the likes of which existed nowhere else. Nigerian princes and Indian IRS employees worldwide were left aghast.
And since then, this has been the infernal cycle of every “online movement” to come about, especially the TRP’s derivatives. There’s the political derivative (MAGA punditry/Alt-Right), the financial one (Crapto Currency), the health and fitness one (Clavicular) — there’s even an Islamic one.
I’ve been open before about being a longtime lurker of “red pill” and “right wing” content for years, and how it’s shaped my own thought as it pertains to my own opinions and beliefs as a Sunni Muslim. I was posting my own articles and tweets soon after on the topics concerning American Muslims, the books I was reading, and the history I loved because that’s what interested me — every writer likes to think their particular stuff is the most original thing in the world, but there was truly very few people at the time (2021-2022) honestly talking about the stuff I was on about. Of course that number grew, and you ended up with multiple schools of thought on the topic influenced by the already existing groups of Muslims online. The salafis, the modernist secularists, the academics — each to this day has their own ideas when it comes to the topic of living out Islam in the modern day, whether in a Western nation or Muslim one, and especially as it pertained to being a young man in one.
The first big wave of guys to talk about this stuff, who already had big followings in the Muslim community, were the “Dawah Bros.” They had big questions to answer for a new generation of young Muslims riding the American Monoculture War, who were now entirely exposed to the Red Pill madness and found it incredibly attractive despite the fact they couldn’t do much with it. Is Feminism kufr? Was Aisha really married at that young an age? Should women still be educated? How do I secretly marry three more wives?
Like all young Muslim men today, each an inheritor of a dying traditional culture, questions such as these became the main talking points incubating the Muslim online space, and all of it really is downstream of one big question: why don’t I recognize the women of my generation anymore? Those of us who attained adulthood before COVID and AI can all agree that it feels we inherited a world akin to a real life ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers,’ where the “sensible and kind” Muslim women we were told we would marry growing up were replaced by Cluster B Tiktokers who can’t pass a Turing Test.
Because most of these guys answering such questions are boring academics and youtubers, their attempts didn’t make much of a splash. The high-minded types were always engaged, but most young men just weren’t captured. Even mainstream Islamic institutions like Yaqeen Institute tried with articles and convention lectures, (approaching the topic with about as much subtlety as aliens who are just finding out what human males are). But, as an insider once told me, they can’t seem to balance out their massive female to male viewership ratio no matter what they do. They aren’t ignorant of this, they’ve had meetings about this and have tried their best — they just didn’t have “it.”
What was missing was something no one could put their finger on at the time. Of course in retrospect, we know what it is: unabashed humor, boldness, and slashing direct rhetoric that wasn’t patronizing to young men, exposed an inherent resentment of them, or was still sterile and politically correct just for the sake of it. They needed intelligent, charismatic men to look up to who didn’t have to be saints or warriors, just sensible guys who were willing to distill and popularize our rightful sentiments about our poisonous culture. Morever, those of us worth anything knew that when it comes to these questions of women and politics we don’t care so much about debating their inherent flaws after a certain point, what interests us is what can we do. What can we change and build? How can we become just five or ten percent better for the sake of our younger brothers and sons?
We never really got any of that. Instead, we got the Trump model of jolly bully big man entertainment in politics, which downstream from that came Andrew Tate culture, and from him came a thousand Gen Z and millenial streamers with possibly the most unlikeable, shameless, anti-intellectual culture that has ever been spurred into existence, both Muslim and otherwise. It’s a pool now of failed prankster youtubers and Dawah guys pushing forty too dumb to speak at the ICNA convention, and this new age of younger, deracinated sock puppets like Sneako and Clavicular who exist as tentacles of the current cultural malaise.
It is, genuinely, hard to conceive of these people as thoughtful human beings. On the more “traditional” side of influencers and thinkers supposedly educated and decide to focus their energy on “defending Islam” itself, you have Mohammed Hijab, Daniel ‘Thanks for the Super Chat” Haqiqatjou, the Muslim Jack O’ Lantern, the Orthogonal Muslim, the Wanker, the Salafi Pirate, Abu Based al-GoFundMe, and so on. When I think of every single one of these figures, I find it amazing that it’s impossible to articulate a single unique opinion they hold that wasn’t assigned to them by the culture war or trends in religious debates that resulted from it, and neither do you.
I challenge any one of you to tell me something genuine these men have said regarding their own view of the world, on contributing to a culture or a community, on building a project out of their own religious passion that didn’t have a subscribe or tip button attached to it. You could watch these guys for ten years straight and not know a single thing about what books have directed their thought, what students they’ve left for the public to learn from, or what lasting institutions or cultural imprints they’ve given us. They are no different than AI chatbots programmed to react to and appeal to our lowest selves and feelings every time we open up our X timelines, and the fact we give them any time of day is a travesty.
Some of you might say that the alternative to not making content about the topics they discuss and debate about is to not speak of it at all. The reality is they will, unfortunately, always be spoken about to some extent — what’s insane is the attitude towards it and the nihilism directed towards keeping it going for the sake of subscribers and streamer revenue.
Take Sneako for example. Despite all his stupid antics, he wouldn’t be such a toxic and stupid figure if his persona was one of an exploratory “here’s what I’m finding out and sharing with you” as he learns and grows as a Muslim. Instead, whether because this is his online career or the fact he’s an ignorant fool, he pretends to be a Malcolm X-like figure who is pompously “defending” Islam by arguing and insulting every purported enemy it has, and all to our detriment. He is a complete and utter jahil who is weaponizing his own ignorance as entertainment. Funnily enough, he’s actually a kind of Alibaba-quality Malcolm X, in that he’s acting like NOI-era Malcolm, who in that stage of his life was a divisive and antagonistic figure who constantly brought hate and malice to all the other civil rights figures of his time through various media antics. Far bigger figures than Sneako who hate Islam, hate Muslims, think we’re less than insects; all have been goading on and encouraging Sneako to talk about his recent religious identity precisely for this reason. That’s where the comparison stops, obviously, and what we’re left with instead is an ignorant, uncharismatic, almost painfully uneducated streamer who consistently embarrasses us in every online forum for young people he presents himself in.
Another relatively popular example is Daniel Haqiqatjou. What can I say about Danny boy? Not much actually, because if the Muslims all across where he lives and where his nearest mosques are don’t know anything about him, how can I?
I know a lot of converts to Islam. Dear friends of mine, genuine guys who embraced our faith and heritage years ago — and they all rightfully suffered from the loneliness their new path in life brought them. Not just from family and friends who abandoned them after they converted, but from Muslims themselves who they found difficult to integrate with if they weren’t social butterflies or culturally-flexible. Daniel, functionally, is also a convert (per his own testimony — he grew up in a secular Shia household in Texas) whether he admits it or not, and therefore it blows me away that he willingly chooses to be such an alienating, apocalyptic, and repulsive figure both online and (allegedly) offline. A career contrarion for the sake of it. As an Ivy-League graduate who started off writing great arguments about the ugliest parts of modern society he was top of the line, but he pivoted in a matter of a few years to being a keyboard pugilist with no Islamic teachers to speak of, no students, no community, and no lasting cultural impacts on the Muslim space. In the applied world of Daniel Haqiqatjou, young men have no discernable madhab in fiqh other than taking “whatever pisses the feminists off most” from every school they can find. They are virginity-inquisitive Aspergers patients who can recite why the trinity is false by heart, and despite being Sunni are more welcome likely to make ziyara to Karbala than the Haramayn, because “saying the haqq” from your American basement takes precedence over visiting the Kaaba or the Prophet’s (SAW) grave.
And there you have it. You bring the fade-cut Sneakos from one end and the Haqiqatjou azizams from the other, and gosh darn it my dear sir, you have a jackpot on your hands! All you have to do is have your AI editor of choice take the SPICIEST and MOST BASED clips from such erudite figures and repost them ten times a day online, and you’ll never have to work for a living again. You will tell yourself repeatedly that this is honest work, that you’re posting “religious” and “moral” content that gets back at the evil Jews and feminists, and may raise the cortisol levels of evil heretics and KUFFAR like Alex Jones one single nanogram per deciliter. You may not pray consistently, you may not have built anything worthwhile for any other Muslim, but you will still tell yourself that Allah rewards you for this, that this is your Jihad, and that this is the most you can be doing for the Ummah.
And the best part is that it is. You are, in fact, entirely useless to us, and all you have done is sunk us deeper in a political and religious environment full of fear and loathing for anything Muslim. You have almost permanently entrenched the online world young Muslim men try to escape to get some semblance of community and scholarship into an infernal seven rings of ignorance. Worse yet, you’ve made the online Muslim sphere into such a muddy pig sty with your disgusting GPT-generated captions and facetious rage bait that the gold nuggets of culture-producing Sunni Muslims who aren’t retarded or inverts are the hardest to find than in any point in internet history.
Congratulations. May Allah give you exactly what you all deserve.
Came for the Hunter Thompson reference, stayed for the brilliant analysis.
As an admitted Roman Catholic and thus infidel in your POV, yet in the American right wing space, I feel like I relate to this article a lot. Despite tens of Muslim/Arabic terms I didn't understand, it still feels like you're speaking my language. I more or less followed, and resonated, with your grievances here. I sympathize, and support your honest efforts.