This infamous quote from 1984 is uttered by Julia when she offers the most critical evaluation of the psychology behind ‘The Party’s’ manipulation tactics. When Winston ponders why the people around him are so fervent with their zealous marching and obedience towards Big Brother, Julia exposes their passion and infatuation as simply “sex gone sour”. All the repressed emotion that they aren’t allowed to express otherwise; the party bottles it up and reuses it as feverish ideological worship. Transforming passion and fear into hatred.
This is exactly what I think about many muslim male scholars on the internet. The focus here isn’t just a criticism of the Taliban or the islamic fundamentalists littered around the world – known to explicitly oppress women. This piece centres around the often western born, self proclaimed liberal muslims who make tiktoks and youtube videos on modest culture. Those who flood the comments sections of young women who they see wearing tight clothes and makeup with threats of hellfire and imminent hatred.
This is also about the men in your houses and friends in your schools who absorb these biases from the internet. Implicitly, redirecting their fear and shame towards their own sexuality onto the women in their lives, in turn hypersexualing their small autonomous decisions into unforgivable transgressions. Turning simple personal choices into moral crimes.
It’s time we dissected why so many well known popular female influencers are taking off their hijab?
HalalSlaughterhouse.com
‘Dawah brothers’, is a label given to men who make podcasts on tiktok (an epidemic in itself), and make it their objective to “give dawah”, which means to preach and spread the message of Islam. However, recently a lot of muslim women have come to the realization that these men seem to be rooted in misogyny. Whilst they intend to guide muslims, inadvertently they entrench overtly sexual, onerous and exhaustingly strict regulations onto the muslim women within their communities.
Recently a very popular hijabi influencer, who goes by the online pseudonym EarthtoKhadija, has come under fire by Dawah brothers and muslim netizens alike. Impressively, she holds an account with 1.3 million followers on Instagram and 900k plus on Tiktok; established as a well known face within the muslim community. However, in the past few weeks, she briefly issued a statement on how she feels at times, uncomfortable with her relationship with her hijab, and needs space; that her journey needs to be ultimately left and evaluated by her alone.
This was a monumental moment for the online muslim community because EarthToKhadija is one the most inspiring female voices on the internet, and she is championed by her ability to be approachable and light hearted in her videos centred around religious advice and discussion, inspiring other young women to be confident with modesty and representing Islamic values publicly. Most importantly she is a black American muslim woman, which makes her online presence substantial since Islamic spaces are dominated by Middle Eastern and South Asian voices, since African American muslims only constitute 20% of the American population.
Immediately she was flooded with tens of comments of criticism, using condescending language to talk about her fall from grace and how she needs to be ‘guided’ again. She has experienced so much distress in the past two weeks and taken criticism from so many supporters or audience members that watching the tide turn against her has been disproportionate, shocking and evident of a very entitled rhetoric . Despite having done nothing harmful, illegal or hurtful to others or herself, she received damning backlash that often goes to show how the internet is a halal slaughterhouse for muslim women. How they are not allowed to exist unless they exist the way their internet audience wants them to, and how this pressure bubbles beneath the surface until it bleeds into their anxieties and haunts their every decision, bullying them into submission at the cost of being told they are ‘good enough’ muslims.
This is reminiscent of the cyberbullying endured by Youtuber Dina Tokio, a well known English-Egyptian fashion vlogger who made hijab tutorials that garnered millions of views. Except what happened to Dina was much more horrific and overwhelming because it happened at a time where there was less understanding and more judgement on the internet . Dina introduced a lot of young women, including myself, to hijab, and she was a very influential figure in normalising hijabis in the early 2010s. Her originality lied in how she made women still feel feminine, well dressed and confident whilst they wore something that often felt isolating and often dehumanising within a Western society.
However, when she took her hijab off , the backlash she received was so intense and the influx of comments she received were ripe with sick and abhorrent criticism . She made a video quickly following the negative comments titled “The Bad, the Worse and Ugly,” where she read some of the most disturbing comments for fourty-seven minutes, gaining 1.2 million views. This was six years ago, and not much has changed since. Dina and Khadija are but two of dozens and dozens of young women who have been cornered and targeted in the war between misogynistic values and controlling women’s decision making in the online world.
However, what propelled and validated a lot of this hatred towards these young women was commentary from ‘Dawah Bros’ like Ali Dawah. For example, he made several videos reacting to Dina taking her hijab off for his ‘education series’, the Y Files. Within this video he claims “I’m here to encourage you guys to know the truth” and that when women choose to take off their hijabs: “they call themselves free, but believe me, they’re not free.”
Speaking for all women, deciding the ambit of what they are allowed to experience or experiment with – this is the fundamental problem with Dawah bros. They come in with sweeping statements of judgement first, and contextualisation usually never. Infantilising a woman’s ability to think and feel for herself in the name of protecting Islam, a religion that is meant to be about the mental journey and struggle with the self (internal jihad), is the reason many women feel so suffocated by the fabric of male centred faith.
Your sexuality is your problem and here’s the porn to prove it
A lot of muslim men feel the need to take on the role of guiding society because of a statement made by the Prophet Mohammed: “the ulama (Islamic scholars) are the heirs of the prophet”. There are also incredible male scholars such as Mufti Menk who have done so successfully.
However, I feel a lot of the online dawah that some men choose to focus on is just a projection of their own sexual repressions or ‘transgressions’ that they seem uncomfortable with. A lot of the rhetoric coming from them heavily and repeatedly focuses on women’s bodies and modesty, and the problem with this is that they seem to be reducing the message and focus of Islam to the crevices of a woman’s body when it is tenfold more than that.
The concept of temptation and sexuality is a two way street. However, women disproportionately carry the onus and burden of sexuality whilst men aren’t equally called out for the consequences of their sexual urges. It is men that are committing the majority of sex crimes, biologically having a ‘higher sex drive’, and consuming the most pornography internationally. Yet women are the centre of a discussion they don’t have much agency over. It’s a hypocritical demand because Dawah brothers think blaming the opposite gender, expecting them to cover up and reducing their autonomy within society, is a much simpler resolution than reforming and addressing the flaws within men themselves.
This is made evident in Carrie Weisman’s 2015 article “Why is porn exploding in the Middle East?”. She reflects the time where Mia Khalifa was receiving fatwas from the muslim world and ISIS members, and Sila Sahin, a Turkish-German actress, was receiving death threats for posing nude for the German edition of Playboy. Yet, simultaneously, at this time some of the world’s top porn consumers came out of the Middle Eastern countries. It’s clear that the men from the countries shaming these women were also the ones watching them the most.
There are also five main pillars in Islam; hijab is not one of them yet this seems to be the guillotine where most women lose their necks. There are also a range of conflicts, human rights and poverty stricken dilemmas happening in the heart of muslim majority countries such as Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan – just to name a few. However, a lot of alleged scholars and commentators have decided to not focus on a lot of these wars and conflicts that are tearing apart muslim communities on a larger scale as much; and instead have decided that starting a war on hijabis is more fundamental to the foundations and messages of Islam.
The entire focus of male Islamic scholarship seems embarrassingly lost and contradictory.
So is Islam brainwashing women? Are muslims finally waking up?
No, that’s not it.
I don’t think Islam exists to perpetuate sexism, I just think we’ve left its message to the wrong voices. Nor is this an attack against the hijab; a lot of women feel spiritually empowered physically representing their faith, and they should have the choice to do so.
One of my favourite recent articles on feminism in Islam is ‘Debunking Nawal El Saadawi’s Views on Religion : A Critical Response’ by the Muslim Observer on Substack. The piece recognises the excellence of El Saadwai’s work as an Egyptian feminist but also gives a nuanced take on her mistake with muddling Islamic values with cultural injustices. For example, the writer breaks down El Saadwi’s famous quote “religion is a political institution built on power, not on spirituality,” and how it does an injustice to the “dynamism” of Islam, and “dangerously flattens centuries of diverse religious practices.” That it is cultural practices rooted in misogyny that have sullied the agency given to women in Islam, not the other way around.
Islam has been utilised and contorted by patriarchal societies, like many religions before it such as Christianity and Hinduism, to feed and validate male egos and their desire to control and subjugate women. Therefore, Islam is as much as the victim of the patriarchy as the women it is weaponised against in the aim of elevating the ability of men to control both. By letting certain men define the ambit of Islam, we are also feeding into the patriarchy.
Despite this, I think female scholars are changing the game. The most invigorating religious scholarship or commentary online has come from really inspiring women who have made faith seem much more palatable than most male scholars, through their online discussions. The forefront of this successful development are podcasters “The Digital Sisterhood” and influencer “EarthtoKhadija”. Their advice, religious guidance and words about God are not centred around a woman’s hijab, but mainly about their experiences with grief, with life’s challenges, and their self discovery which has been assisted through divine guidance.
A tapestry of topics that go beyond the hold of a single fabric.
