I’ve written a few posts about this on IG, which in retrospect was likely foolish of me, because I know this is a much more complicated topic than social media can handle, and so I have myself to blame for initially writing it in an counterproductive format.
So let me give the full story because a lot gets lost in bite-size IG posts.
Before I begin, I will disclose that I’ve been teaching Islam to teenagers and university-age students since 2017. This also includes faith counseling. Almost 50% of my hundreds of students (alhamdulillah) thus far have been females. Some of my best students have been females. I’ve likely been more involved in the religious upbringing of girls than many of the female critics I could ever have. I’m not saying I did it perfectly every time or that I didn’t make mistakes, but I definitely have the experience to be assertive about what I’m going to say here.
I was also raised in a family of sisters only, and I only have daughters myself. So this conversation is more than just a blog article for me. It’s a very personal one for me that is immensely relevant to my role as a teacher of Islam, a teacher of young women, a brother & a father.
The main message I want to convey is: no one will win in these gender wars on social media. No good will come from it. Female Muslim influencers & preachers risk becoming the very monsters they seek to battle, if they haven’t already.
In order to understand why, we first have to deconstruct the entire phenomenon.
Gendered controversies for Muslims today have 3 different aspects:
1) Realities on the ground & in our communities
2) Academic & scholarly discussions on gender & Islam
3) Social media gender wars.
None of these are as simple as they first seem. So let’s go through each one.
Realities on the ground & in our communities
When it comes to realities on the ground, women are indeed often the primary victims. I wrote about this back in 2021, and urged Muslim men to understand the legitimate grievances that Muslim women have. So I won’t repeat myself here in detail. I encourage you to read that older article before you continue.
I’ve advised many girls & young women over the years to take up self-defense, carry bear spray (pepper spray is illegal in Canada), or at the very least learn how to give a man a swift & powerful kick between his legs. I’ve unfortunately also encountered cases of young girls (and boys) being sexually violated by family members, and had to help them or get them help.
It is indeed disturbing to see how many Muslim males are involved in cases of sexual assault or violence. It is indeed a case that requires greater urgency to address it – in a practical sense – i.e. to actually fix it via Islamic education, spiritual tarbiyah, and enforcing punishments on the depraved perpetrators who do it.
So to make it clear here: I am not dismissing in any way whatsoever the claim or fact that Muslim women suffer disproportionately when it comes to gender-based discrimination. I never have.
So let’s look at the other two aspects to see what I’m trying to articulate.
Academic & scholarly discussions on gender & Islam
I have been speaking to many students of knowledge & scholars about this over the past year, and I expect to do so even more in the near future (besides perhaps contributing myself inshaAllah). The urgency of this issue cannot be overstated. I initially recognized it as a problem many years ago. Unfortunately I have been busy with other projects.
Unfortunately the current state of these discussions are abysmal. Most of what we have so far are works written by feminist Islamic Studies professors whose grounding is based on philosophical frameworks foreign to our tradition. These are usually female academics who drank the critical theory Kool-Aid or whose academic output is a means to justify their own nifāq. In many cases these authors are women or feminists first, and Muslims second. And yes I’ve read many of their writings and even had conversations with a few, so this is not empty rhetoric.
Many of the individuals of this type I now strongly believe to be among the most dangerous people of bid’ah in our time due to their influence & damage to the ummah. Their first principles are grounded in Foucault & Butler, not the Sunni madhhabs of fiqh or theology, or the agreed-upon meanings of the Qur’an & Sunnah.
The number of useful works that respect the Islamic scholarly tradition are very few, if almost non-existent.
Most remarkably, we have yet to establish a Quranic gender ontology – one that constructs from the Qur’an rather than imposing onto it – that would form the foundation of any fiqh, tafsir or hadith discussions that may arise. The absence of this critical work means that whenever we discuss the issue of gender in Islam whether in scholarly circles or in public preaching, we are missing an articulation of fundamental theological principles that are essential to it! This is not easy work. This is the kind of effort that requires a Taha Abderrahmane kind of figure to produce. The only authors I have seen who have started this discussion are Celene Ibrahim and Sachiko Murata. Ahmed Sayyid has done a decent job as well, although its just a basic overview.
So here we are. We are dealing with serious issues in our communities and we want our scholars to address them. But the tools needed for them to do so do not even exist yet. And yet… influencers and amateur preachers online have taken it upon themselves to argue, debate and fight about these issues on social media. If the conceptual structures don’t exist yet for scholars… then what are these loudmouths online basing their arguments on?
Social media gender wars
The social media phenomenon of gender wars is NOT the same phenomenon as the previous two, even if they are linked. This is because they each operate by their own rules.
The real-life issues on the ground are a compounded effect of a messy history of social trauma & poor parenting practices, poor ethical & spiritual character etc that has existed in human beings forever.
The academic/scholarly problem is one that is a result of the blindingly fast-paced change of modernity colliding with the relatively slow ability of scholarship to adjust (which is a problem not unique to Islamic scholarship).
Social media is a world of its own. It doesn’t reflect lived reality, and it doesn’t reflect academic or scholarly reality.
Social media is full of echo chambers designed by corporations who want you to stay addicted to their software, content designed by people who just want to feed their ego or sell you something, and agendas of local and foreign government analyzing your data and using psychological tricks against you to achieve their objectives. None of this is new. It’s all common knowledge now. Even if you started with noble objectives, it won’t be long before you’re swept away by the tide.
But I want to tell you a story. Back in 2019 I was one of the first people to start calling out angry male influencers online for their harsh and one-sided ‘refutations’ and tabloid-pieces on Muslim feminism & feminists. While I knew the issue needed to be addressed, I immediately recognized that the way it was being done by these people would eventually lead to a backlash by ‘the other side’. I was one of the first to point this out, but unfortunately my concerns fell on mostly deaf ears.
I haven’t kept up to date with many of these angry male influencers and preachers since, and I actually avoid their content completely because it’s massively counterproductive and a waste of my time. All it does is make me angry. But those who followed my writings on Facebook from 2020 to 2024 know how often I critiqued these individuals directly and indirectly. I also was one of the first to critique their absurd and disturbing obsession with Andrew Tate.
Sadly, the polarization I feared because of their approach has now come to pass. The problem with female influencer discourse is that it is now becoming the same monster that the male ones became. The same damage those angry male preachers did to young men, they are now doing to young women. Just like these men used anger, caustic language, sweeping statements, tabloid-like writings, twisting & selective quoting of sacred text & scholarly references to serve one’s polemic, and harsh language bereft of wisdom in their ‘preaching’… I am now seeing the same patterns in female influencer/preacher content on IG, as well as their followers.
I spent years trying to advise these male influencers, directly and indirectly. I will now say the same thing to the female ones that I once said to the male preachers.
Do you want to help heal the ummah and fix it, or do you just want to go on a full out assault against the ‘other side’? Yes you’re angry, but the Prophet SAW said, “Don’t get angry.”
If not, how do you expect the many good men left – among students of knowledge, scholars, husbands, fathers and brothers – to deeply empathize with what you are saying, see your point of view and support you? Do you think that generalizing your criticism to all men by using evil men as a strawman is helpful for achieving this objective?
All that’s going to happen is that the good men will be pushed further away. No one wins. Nothing constructive happens. Nothing changes for the better. We all end up worse off because of it.
Whenever I spoke to my female students about evil men I would try my best to remind them there were still good men out there. Because I knew that if I didn’t do that, they would develop a deep mistrust of the opposite gender that would damage their capacity for having relationships with them for the rest of their lives.
I am now seeing this among Muslim girls and young women. A deep mistrust of Muslim men to the extent that no one wants to get married or tolerate the flaws of otherwise good men who face their own challenges of oppression at the hands of Islamophobic governments, war, a female-dominated therapist landscape, economic problems, corporations etc. And who are they using as justification for this attitude? Female preachers & influencers on IG.
It’s also very important to mention: the other half of my students have been boys and young men. They also suffer and feel pain and have their own challenges just like the females do, just perhaps not in the way that you understand. Yes they do not face the same level of sexual violence – but they are victims of a destructive phase of human existence nonetheless. Their mothers usually understand though.
I fear this write-up will once again fall on deaf ears as has been the case since 2018, but it is my responsibility to try. Were it not for the Hadith ‘من قال هلك الناس فهو أهلكهم’ I would have lost hope in this ummah completely by this point.
A final note
I have quietly wondered the past year why the aggressively Islamophobic Trump, Hegseth and Zios have done relatively little against the local Muslim community in the USA, besides shutting off Muslim immigration.
I’m starting to wonder if they know that once immigration stops, all they have to do is wait for religious Muslims to destroy each other on stupidity like Sufi/Salafi and gender debates, while the rest just assimilate into the American materialistic & hedonistic monoculture.
I don’t think it’s far fetched. Using social media and AI, governments & corporations have more data on us, how we behave and how to affect us than ever before.
A certain female Islamic Studies professor who should be more concerned about the ukhrawi ramifications of her heterodox understandings of Islam than anything I say, was quite offended by my insistence that these ‘gender wars’ are an obnoxious, toxic and shallow distraction given what has been happening in Gaza and the Middle East as a whole.
I don’t really care what useful idiots think anymore, but I stand by that statement. Social media discourse has become a disconnection from reality.
The Sufi/Salafi debates and ‘gender wars’ discussions intensified greatly after October 7th, and the reason is either that we are so incredibly blind or stupid that we can’t realize how badly Shaytan is playing us, or that there are people deliberately planted by human Shayatīn who are instigating us against each other.
Both have historical precedent in Islamic & modern history, let alone Shaytan himself. It’s an ancient technique that our enemies have used against us and we’ve always fallen for.
May Allah grant us clarity & action based on clarity.
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