Names have been changed to protect identities. The original article was is published hereand all content belongs to original author.
Sabrine is sitting in her ten-year-old brother’s room one night, playing Xbox, when he asks her if she knows who Andrew Tate is.
“I heard other boys at school talking about him – they wanted to pick him for our English project but the miss wouldn’t let them,” he told her. Sabrin froze. He knew that Tate and the wider incel culture had over teenage boys and young men all over the world. He saw it as a dangerous virus of violent misogyny spreading through social media and infiltrating impressionable minds. But she never expected her brother in Year One to talk about him: she still thought of him as a baby.
“I didn’t know how to explain it to him in a way he could understand. I just said he hates women and is a bad man,” she tells me, her voice trailing off with the regret she felt later that she didn’t know how to handle the moment. But Sabrine was even more at a loss for words when her little brother brought up Tate’s apparent conversion to Islam recently. “Doesn’t that mean he’s a good guy?”
“I just said that in our religion, we value women – heaven is under our mother’s feet. But then, I felt like I failed to get the message across to him. What if he gets affected like these other boys?’
Sabrine did a social media detox at the time because, she says, it was wreaking havoc on her mental health. Plus, it was a huge distraction from her final year law exams, which were coming up. But that night, he decided to log back in, delving into “Muslim Twitter” to confront the problem head-on. She created a fake account using a pseudonym and began obsessively responding to Muslim incel figures who put what she describes as their “dangerous message” online.
Weeks later, it’s something he does regularly. “I’m just questioning the basis of what they’re saying,” he explains. “If they’re posting support for Tate, I’m asking where in our religion does it say we have to support an alleged human trafficker, even if he’s Muslim. If they tweet about the role of women, I challenge them for evidence from the Koran to support their misogynistic views.” Laughing, she explains that she usually just gets blocked, or “takfir,” when someone accuses her of denouncing Islam because of her feminist views. “But I feel like I’m at least doing my little bit now.”
“Muslim Twitter” is shorthand for the corner of the internet dominated by (largely) British Muslims, who share posts about everything from politics to fashion, religion to marriage dilemmas. As a millennial, I feel like I grew up on the internet and it has shaped my identity in a myriad of ways – including my relationship with my faith.
From obsessively watching hijab tutorials on YouTube in the mid-2000s when I was new to being a hijabi to learning almost everything I know about my religion through online lectures in place of the after-school Islamic schools that other Brits usually attend Muslims, the internet is central to my identity. But recently, there has been a seismic shift in Muslim-dominated online spaces as red pill and incel culture has taken hold. The first refers to a misogynist ideology that started on Reddit, arguing that the promotion of women’s rights systematically deprives men. This led to the development of an independent identity—short for involuntary celibacy—among the red fathers, who attributed their sexual dissatisfaction to the liberation of women.
Of course, social media algorithms have a lot to answer for in how they amplify particularly controversial posts. Thanks to my click history, I’m sure I get more exposure to these posts than some, but I know I’m not the only Muslim woman who feels like everything I see online these days is confirmation of the Red Pill Culture taking over the Muslim men.
The disappointing thing is that, despite Tate’s apparent conversion to Islam and his commitment to fueling Muslim support in times of need (eg bringing a Koran to court to face charges of human trafficking), incel culture is coming in stark contrast to Islam’s commitment to gender equality and women’s empowerment. For example, Islam emphasizes that women should keep their name and property after marriage, which is in stark contrast to Tate’s misogynistic belief that women are the property of men. Moreover, Islam’s focus on chastity for both men and women could not be distracted from Andrew Tate’s so-called “porn empire.”
So if Islam and incel culture are so incompatible, then why do the two seem to converge more and more online? As Mariya Bint Rehan writes for Amaliah, a platform championing the voices of Muslim women: “Inceldom and Red Pill thinking are the result of social anxiety around the role of male identity in these volatile economic times. As the nuclear family, and the traditional gender roles and economic roles that define it, face threats from social, political, cultural and global shifts in its foundations.”
Black and brown men in Britain experience economic instability more acutely than their white counterparts, facing higher levels of unemployment and lower average wages. Incel culture and red pill thinking offer a stability based on a hardline conservative ideology that seems alluring in this turbulent economic climate. And when people like Andrew Tate and Muslim viral figures like Ali Dawah and Mohammed Hijab promote a red-pill intersection with Islam, it starts to look like the answer for men facing a generation-defining crisis of masculinity that intersects with state racism and economic. insecurity.
Of course, it is the Muslim women who suffer the consequences. Aisha is a twenty-five-year-old Muslim woman looking for marriage. For her, as a conservative Muslim, this means talking to children who have been introduced to her by her parents or who she knows through the local Muslim community in Manchester. “I was so shocked,” he tells me, “by how many of them seem indoctrinated by this red pill ideology.” Stifling a laugh, she recalls how one man even had Andrew Tate as his WhatsApp picture. “That was an automatic no for me,” she says, rolling her eyes.
Aisha’s sister, Naseema, is six years older than her, and the two sisters have noticed a significant difference in their experiences of searching for a potential husband. A few years ago, for Naseema, it was more about the compatibility of personalities and how aligned they were in terms of religious and personal perspectives. But Aisha describes her quest as “constantly putting out fires. I need to have a list of questions to ask now to flush out any secret misogynists.”
Things took a dark turn for Aisha when she spoke to a man who took her final rejection very badly. “I had some red flags,” he explained. “He was very adamant that we should live in his mum’s small flat and wanted children from the start,” – while Aisha dreams of traveling the world with her future husband before settling down to start a family. When she politely told him she didn’t think they were compatible, he completely changed. Despite never meeting in person, only talking on the phone and texting frequently, he threatened to spread rumors about her in her close community that the two were intimate with each other.
“She knew this would ruin my reputation,” she tells me, clearly distressed by her ordeal. “He started using misogynistic language: he called me an egg and said something about how he had a God-given right to a good wife, meaning I had no right to reject him.” He even said she was too old for a “high value man” like himself anyway – a mindset Aisha felt was borrowed straight from incel culture: the idea that women are something men are entitled to.
Given the way Muslim communities are over-policed in this country, it feels disappointing that more isn’t being done to tackle the scourge of incels and red pill thinking online. How long will Muslim women like Aisha and Sabrine bear the brunt of a culture in which violent misogyny can run rampant?
