I just listened to Jordan Peterson directly accusing Muslims of having a rape culture & that Muslim countries are regressive & undemocratic. He's also exposed himself to be a hardline zionist but some Muslim men here not long ago looked to him with admiration.
Andrew Tate, another figure these Muslim men admired until he too came out as an Islamphobe and encouraged a racist riot against UK Muslims. We need to contend with this phenomenon more seriously as there's something deeply wrong here we can't just move on from.
I've been observing this for over a decade in online spaces. The motivation is complicated but there's a consistent theme we can point to: an opposition to feminism & projecting onto Muslim women with a critical voice who is seen as a cultural menace, conspiring against them.
This contempt for women's voices, concealed as a concern for 'feminism', is a defence of an abstract masculinity with little to do with Islam. It runs so deep that they are willing to compromise Islam, collude with the far right/white supremacists, to oppose it.
What the positive reception to Andrew Tate & Jordan Peterson ultimately revealed is that these vocal Muslim men were willing to sell out their community, women & deen, for this abstract masculinity.
The irony? They've been accusing Muslim feminists for being double-agents when it's always been them - enabling fitna to enter community spaces, poisoning young men with ideas that have no basis in tradition. It is the Muslim manosphere that's the cultural menace.
We've been trying to write about this as ethically and carefully as we can because we know our community is already a hyper-surveilled one & Muslim men are already criminalised. This was our first attempt: jstor.org
It will follow with a Special Issue to dig deeper into the Muslim manosphere, what it reveals, the dangers it has brought & what lessons does it draw for Muslims. If we don't understand this moment now we will repeat it and perhaps with greater detriment.
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