The Small, Growing World of Muslim MRAs
The manosphere’s Islamophobia won’t keep them from choosing ‘the red pill’
Earlier this month, I was told I had become too emasculated to get married.
Over a grainy Facebook Live feed, a bearded man draped in white robes shouted: “There is a problem with Muslim men today!” He continued: “They complain that they can’t get married to good Muslim women, but they have allowed the women… to be corrupted by Western ideals, and, as a result, belittle them as men.”
The 30-something man, who goes by the pseudonym Abu Muawiyah, gives this type of marriage workshop semi-frequently via Facebook. He lives in a small town in the north of England and livestreams from his living room, sporting a white thoba (a type of Islamic robe) and an unkempt beard. It’s the first time I’ve seen his face (his profile picture is simply a picture of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem), and his profile says little about him, other than “liking” pages for dawah (Islamic proselytizing) and Assassin’s Creed.
Abu Muawiyah says he wants to help young Muslim men living in the West get married because he feels most mosques in the U.K. have failed at that. “Most imams know nothing about relationships,” he complains, and have mainly “given advice for outdated arranged marriages.” It’s an issue that many Muslim men wanting to pursue relationships in an “Islamically permissible” way will attest to. Still, Abu Muawiyah’s workshops are fairly small — during this session, only 20 people tuned in, dropping to around five by the end of the session. He’s not particularly well known in the mainstream British Muslim scene — except by the community of Muslim men with a broader interest in “men’s rights,” who connect largely through private Facebook groups.
Muawiyah’s following may be small, but according to experts, the number of Muslim men who feel their masculinity is under threat is growing. “It’s likely that there are a lot more men like this who really only talk about their vulnerabilities, especially when it comes to their masculinity, on the internet,” says Amanullah De Sondy, a senior lecturer in contemporary Islam at University College Cork and the author of The Crisis of Islamic Masculinities. “Emerging ideas of feminism and gender rights are being incorporated into the discourse around British Muslim identity, which you can see on social media. But on the other side, there are men who will feel like their identities — personal, cultural and religious identities — are under threat because they’re considered to be outdated, or less relevant… So when they see online movements that reinforce their ideas, their stereotypes, it’s completely natural for them to be attracted to that.”
To most imams living in Britain, the difficulty that young Muslim men are having in getting married is the effect of living in a liberal Western society. As women become more educated, pursue long-term careers and live independently, marrying young is becoming more of a rarity. But to men like Abu Muwaiyah, the trend indicates something far more sinister — that Islam, and the role it has set for women, has been corrupted by feminism.
“This is not simply a case of allowing sisters to study — [men] have said we will let you study! There is no obstacle!” He sips a glass of water, and then stares intensely into the screen. “Our sisters fear us. They fear men. They have been taught and corrupted by western feminism!” A series of Facebook’s blue “thumbs up” tabs fly across the screen.
According to Abu Muawiyah, feminism has singlehandedly made men “feel weak and helpless, depend… on women and shirk away from their responsibilities to become husbands and fathers.” He point to the feminist influence on Christianity as “forcing men out of churches” and a potent warning to Muslims. “The feminists will try to corrupt our sisters, and it is the job of [Muslim men] to stop that from happening.”
I came across Abu Muawiyah while researching the ways in which young Muslim men in Britain use the internet to interact with women for a book. For months, I’ve been exploring web forums and Facebook groups dedicated to helping marriage-age Muslims connect. Muawiyah posted videos and links related to “halal marriages” regularly in these groups, but he was far more active in the “manosphere,” an eclectic and often hateful mix that includes everything from bodybuilding forums to message boards for men’s rights activists and “Men Going Their Own Way” (MGTOW) to less vitriolic conversations about masculinity and issues facing men.
Abu Muawiyah discovered the manosphere late last year. He had recently graduated as an engineer from Manchester University, had a steady job and — most important to Muawiyah — was a devout, practicing Muslim. While his flatmates at university regularly partied, drank and took drugs, he spent his free time learning about Islam and studying the Qur’an — in his words, “becoming a real Muslim.” After graduation, he felt he was in an “ideal place” to get married.
“We are told, when looking for spouses, that religion must come first,” he says. “So I went to meet many [Muslim] women and their parents, in a completely halal way. I told them that this is what I am: I am a practicing Muslim, I want to raise practicing children, and I want to ideally move to an Islamic country in future.” Despite all that, he had no luck; no prospective wife returned his calls.
Frustrated by the sense that imams at mosques he attended were of little use in helping him find a partner, Muwaiyah found solace speaking to other men in similar situations on web forums like ummah.com and Salafitalk.net. Over private Facebook chats, they would spend countless hours posting Islamic lectures about the roles of men in society, particularly about how modern life was corrupting the spiritual life desired by Allah, and how Muslim men could best fulfill their religious duties. “It was like the start of a kind of Muslim MGTOW movement,” he says.
Muslims have a relatively small presence in the manosphere. In part, that’s because of the anti-religious stance taken by some within its communities, who feel that organized religion is designed to control men, make them subordinate and deprive them of “sexual success.” While some MRAs post about the value of Christian ideas about masculinity, they’re much more fearful and hostile toward Islam. A cursory look at manosphere forums will show posts from users who view Islam as the second-greatest threat after feminism, and male Muslim refugees as an existential threat to white Western women.
Abu Muawiyah tends to shrug off what these posts suggest about the manosphere. “It’s a big place, and important to know that not every user is the same. Ultimately, it’s a sign that more and more men are waking up to the problems of feminism in life — something Islam has repeatedly warned us about.” Muawiyah wasn’t sure how many other Muslim men subscribed to the Manosphere’s ideas in the same way he did, but was confident that more Muslim guys were reading message boards than posting.
I reached out to a number of Muslims in these groups for comment. None responded, until I came across Nabeel Azeez, a Dubai-based copywriter, who also runs a website called “Becoming the Alpha Muslim (BTAM)”, which provides articles and at-home courses catering to Muslim men. It’s probably not wrong to suggest that Azeez is the manosphere’s most visible Muslim.
Speaking over email, Azeez told me he set up the website “to tell millennial Muslim men, ‘It’s okay to be a masculine, Muslim man. Embrace it. Revel in it. It is God’s decree.’ It is also an attempt to synthesize a culture that is unapologetically Islamic, not watered-down to appease non-Muslims.”
According to Azeez, the dominance of feminism and secularism in countries where Muslims live negatively affects the way they practice Islam, and his website is needed as a corrective. “Most websites for Muslims living in the west are run and maintained by women… and with women, comes feminism.” (He didn’t name examples, but said this was “well known.”)
Becoming the ‘Alpha Muslim’ means combating feminism using “classical, authentic Islamic teachings, Over email he argued that, “Feminism denies what we Muslims call fitrah, man’s innate disposition… not only is it not compatible with Islam on an ideological basis, it doesn’t even make sense according to biological or sociological fact.”
Though Azeez’s teaching may dovetail with MRA ideology (or as he refers to it The Red Pill or TRP, named for the MRA hub on Reddit), Azeez explicitly rejects the anti-Muslim strains of the manosphere. “Part of the anti-Muslim sentiment comes from the fact that Western, white TRPers are afraid of Muslim men. We are the personification of ‘Alpha’, conquering their weak, Feminized, ‘Beta’ societies.” What’s more, according to Azeez, “Muslims don’t need TRP to tell us that men and women are a certain way and should behave a certain way for society to function properly. We have the Quran, the words of the Prophet Muhammad, and Sacred Tradition.”
Men like Azeez and Muawiyah may be novelties to the wider manosphere at the moment, but Professor De Sondy says there will likely be more of them as younger generations of Muslims attempt to define themselves in the West.
“Women are becoming more visible, and the internet is a big factor in them forming their own social groups, having their own conversations that don’t involve men,” he reminds. “Emerging men’s rights groups may be a reaction felt by those who feel insecure about their position in society — including Muslim men, who, maybe felt they had fixed patriarchal positions that are now on the verge of disappearing. That’s probably really scary for them. ”
Abu Muawiyah disagrees with this analysis. For him, his workshops are much more of a religious duty, designed to keep young Muslims “on the right path”. Eventually, he hopes that people from the manosphere will see Islam as the best way to “combat feminism”.
Laughing, he says: “Islam is the ultimate red pill.”
Hussein Kesvani is a writer in London.
