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 are not allowed to express otherwise, the Party bottles 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 is not 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 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, they hypersexualise small autonomous decisions into unforgivable transgressions, turning simple personal choices into moral crimes. It is time we dissected why so many well-known, popular female influencers are taking off their hijab.
“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 realisation that these men seem to be rooted in misogyny. While 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 900,000-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 to and evaluated by her alone.
This was a monumental moment for the online Muslim community because EarthtoKhadija is one of the most inspiring female voices on the internet. She is championed for 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; Islamic spaces are often dominated by Middle Eastern and South Asian voices, as African American Muslims constitute 20% of the American population.
Immediately, she was flooded with dozens 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 the tide turning against her has been disproportionate and shocking. Despite having done nothing harmful, illegal or hurtful to others or herself, she received damning backlash that goes to show how the internet is a “halal slaughterhouse” for Muslim women. They are not allowed to exist unless they exist the way their internet audience wants them to.
The war on hijabis
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. What happened to Dina was even more intense because it occurred at a time when there was less understanding and more judgement on the internet. Dina introduced a lot of young women, including myself, to the hijab and was an influential figure in normalising hijabis in the early 2010s. Her originality lay in how she made women still feel feminine and confident while wearing something that often felt isolating within a Western society.
However, when she took her hijab off, the influx of comments she received was 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 47 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 of young women who have been cornered in the war between misogynistic values and controlling women’s decision-making in the online world.
What propelled and validated a lot of this hatred was commentary from Dawah brothers 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 and deciding the ambit of what they are allowed to experience — this is the fundamental problem with Dawah brothers. 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” is the reason many women feel so suffocated by the fabric of male-centred faith.
The hypocrisy of projection
A lot of Muslim men feel the need to take on the role of guiding society because of a statement made by the Prophet Muhammad: “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”. A lot of the rhetoric coming from them repeatedly focuses on women’s bodies and modesty, and the problem with this is that they seem to be reducing the message 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 while men are not equally called out for the consequences of their sexual urges. It is men who are committing the majority of sex crimes and consuming the most pornography internationally, yet women are the centre of a discussion they do not have much agency over. It is a hypocritical demand because Dawah brothers think blaming the opposite gender is a simpler resolution than reforming 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 on the time when Mia Khalifa was receiving fatwas from the Muslim world and Sila Sahin, a Turkish-German actress, was receiving death threats for posing nude for Playboy. Yet, simultaneously, some of the world’s top porn consumers were coming out of Middle Eastern countries. It is clear that the men shaming these women were also the ones watching them the most.
There are 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 a range of conflicts and human rights dilemmas happening in Muslim-majority countries such as Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. However, many alleged scholars have decided that starting a war on hijabis is more fundamental to the foundations of Islam than addressing these larger crises.
Reclaiming the narrative
I do not think Islam exists to perpetuate sexism; I just think we have 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 Saadawi’s work as an Egyptian feminist but gives a nuanced take on her mistake with muddling Islamic values with cultural injustices. For example, the writer breaks down El Saadawi’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. 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, to feed and validate male egos. Therefore, Islam is as much a victim of the patriarchy as the women it is weaponised against. By letting certain men define the ambit of Islam, we are feeding into that structure.
Despite this, I think female scholars are changing the game. The most invigorating religious scholarship online has come from inspiring women who have made faith seem much more palatable. The forefront of this development includes the podcasters The Digital Sisterhood and influencer EarthtoKhadija. Their guidance and words about God are not centred around a woman’s hijab, but mainly about their experiences with grief, life’s challenges and self-discovery. It is a tapestry of topics that go beyond the hold of a single fabric.
