“Why are Muslim women becoming feminists?” is the (not so) new “why are Muslim youth becoming radicalized?” sentiment… not amongst non-Muslims fearing the paths of angry young Muslims questioning Western socio-political hegemony, but amongst Muslims who are convinced that Muslim women are plunging our community into destruction by questioning the norms of our cultures and even of our faith. What does it really mean for Muslims to buy into the framework of feminism?

In order to answer the question of why Muslim women have been turning to feminism, we must be willing to have a long and very uncomfortable set of conversations among ourselves. There is no single or simple answer, there is a great deal of community accountability and reckoning required, and there is no neat, tidy way to solve the myriad of problems that we will see evinced throughout this discussion. If anyone truly cares about the wellbeing of Muslim women – and Muslim men, for that matter – we must be willing to overcome the set of (faulty) defenses that we have constructed against all perceived attacks on our community, which has a tendency of conflating the Deen itself with the practices of the people, even when the latter is in wild contradiction of the former.

However, it’s not just about why Muslim women are turning to feminism. Many will ask why such a question is relevant in the first place. Why does it matter that Muslim women are ascribing themselves to feminism? After all, isn’t Islam a feminist religion? Doesn’t Islam uphold women’s rights? Why wouldn’t Muslim women be focused on women’s rights?

These complex questions, and equally complex answers, will be discussed in this paper, but be warned: this is not some pithy piece that will “put feminists in their place” or “smash the patriarchy once and for all.” This is more than just your average Muslim refutation piece. This series is meant to be a glimpse into our history, our ongoing realities, and painful truths that we must finally face before we can seek effective solutions and implement solutions that will mitigate the damage inflicted on our Ummah for centuries.

What Is Feminism?

There is no single definition of feminism. And there’s the rub – to engage with the discussion of feminism in the first place, one must be willing to acknowledge and engage with the messiness of it all. You cannot simply claim that something is “feminism,” come up with a clever comeback, and then declare victory over “feminism.” Whether in academia, social media, or the real world, there are multiple “feminisms” that are being discussed, developed, and deconstructed. There are the many waves of Western feminism; Black feminism; POC feminism; “womanism”1, Christian and Jewish feminism; socialist/ Marxist feminism; “Muslim feminism” (which itself has multiple layers to it) and even “Islamist feminism (or womanism)” (Badran, 2009, pg. 242-245; Hidayatullah, 2014, pg 37-45).

Dictionaries will give you varying definitions (“the belief that women should be allowed the same rights, power, and opportunities as men and be treated in the same way” from the Cambridge Dictionary; “belief in and advocacy of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” from Merriam-Webster – emphasis mine). Loosely and colloquially, many understand feminism as believing in the complete equality of men and women and seeking to replicate that equality at all levels of life and society. Even this is not entirely accurate, as many fiercely discuss and debate the importance of differentiating between “total equality” vs “equity.”

It is important to note that secular feminism has its own unique history in the West, rooted in centuries of ingrained Church-perpetuated beliefs around the inherent inferiority of women, from blaming Eve for Adam’s fall from heaven to witch-hunts and more. I will not fall into the trite habit of boasting about how Islam gave women rights 1400+ years before women in the West received the right to vote. While it is an accurate statement, it does not reflect the realities of Muslim women’s experiences in Muslim societies throughout those 1400+ years. Others have elaborated on the rights Islam gave women elsewhere, and in more scholarly detail I ever could. Our concern, however, is with modern realities, not long-ago eras of Islam’s greatest ideals realized and then lost.

The label of “feminism” has a fraught history in non-Western countries, specifically the Muslim world, where it was used as a tool of colonization even as the suffrage movement was being clamped down in Western countries (Ahmed, 1992, pg. 152-153). Whether under Lord Cromer in Egypt in the late 1880s, or the French in Algeria in the same time period (Rahnama, 2023, pg. 120-153), ‘feminism’ was little more than an imperial tool weaponized for colonial purposes against Muslim populations. Nor was this a historic phenomenon; feminism continues to be used to justify violent Western imperialism against Muslim lands (Ezaydi, 2026, pg 173-197), from the original “War on Terror” invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to the ongoing genocide in Palestine and, currently, the destruction of Iran.

However, this is not to dismiss any and all efforts in the name of women’s rights as a solely colonial enterprise. Even as the West introduced the very category of women’s rights to political and social discourse, there were those who objected to colonization while recognizing that women were, indeed, experiencing significant oppression in our own societies (Mubarak, 2022, pg. 57-61). Women’s rights movements in Muslim countries, often referred to as “feminism,” had their own unique discussions, priorities, and activisms that did not always equate to Western secular feminist agendas (Badran, 2009, pg 1-6; Badran, 1995, pg 223-250). At times, women’s rights movements started in the same place before diverging, as with the formidable Islamist revival figure, Zaynab al-Ghazali, who split from Huda Sha’rawi’s feminist group in 1936 (Badran, 2009, pg. 24-27). Many Islamic activists, including Zaynab al-Ghazali, sought to reject both colonization and the oppression of women, all under an Islamic framework.

Unfortunately, many of us – especially in the West – are disconnected from our Islamic heritage, both ancient and contemporary. In women like Zaynab al-Ghazali and Shaykha Dr. Heba Raouf Ezzat we have examples of how to address the complex issues of anti-Islamic agendas alongside engaging in serious critique of unIslamic attitudes and practices found in Muslim societies (McLarney, 2015, pg. 219-253). Yet – for whatever reasons – their works have neither been widely translated nor made part of the dominant discourse, whether academic or Islamic. Indeed, it is deeply concerning that many who spend hundreds of thousands of hours pontificating on the topic of Islam and women in lectures, webinars, and courses somehow omit their work entirely. As a result, Muslims in the West today conflate any kind of “women’s rights” discussions with feminism even when it is not grounded in secular discourse. Traditionally trained, orthodox shaykhaat (female Islamic scholars) are constantly accused of feminism when they advocate for women’s Shari’ah rights or challenge unIslamic attitudes and behaviours towards women that is claimed to be “Islamic”; even male scholars who advocate for women are accused of being corrupted by feminism, called “white knights,” and attacked for challenging the status quo.

We must be intelligent enough to recognize that, given our geological, social, and linguistic contexts, it is impossible for us to avoid engaging with certain discourses or using certain types of terminology (e.g. patriarchy; misogyny; androcentrism) when we discuss gendered matters. These words are a part of the English language, with clear definitions, even if colloquial usage influences the emotional impact of these words; just as we use terms like “racism,” “ethnocentrism,” and more when we discuss racism as a general concept as well as within Muslim communities. To claim that these words have no basis in our Islamic tradition is to render us mute on more than race and gender issues; it is an idiotic claim that would invalidate half our Islamic intellectual tradition, which contended with far more serious issues of philosophy and creed. Unless we all revert to speaking the fus’ha Arabic of the Messenger’s era and refuse to acknowledge our existence in the modern timeline, we must get over these emotional arguments and deal with the realities we live in – including speaking English and living in Western contexts.

However, this does not mean that we should not develop our own frameworks and vocabularies – we absolutely should, and at least some figures dedicated to meaningful work in the field have undertaken these efforts (McLarney, 2015). This also does not mean that we should not be extremely cautious in terms of the language we used, being aware of the way in which certain terminology is weaponized, and the foundational assumptions underlying that language. Engaging in these discussions to begin with must come with careful analyses of the terminology used, the philosophies behind them, and our theological positionality as Muslims who must contend with these epistemologies. As Talal Asad (2018) notes, the language of secularism (and thus, feminism) is not neutral; it is embedded in power, history, and practice. We cannot be blind to this reality and the ways in which it impacts us at every level.

Colloquial use of terminology that originated in academia usually moves beyond their dictionary definitions and becomes heavily laden with cultural meanings that remove nuance, conflate cause-and-effect, and adopt problematic assumptions that are not properly interrogated. We see much of this especially in online discourse, which takes phrases such as “toxic masculinity” (originally meant to critique some societal beliefs around how men are perceived as masculine) and turns them into caricature accusations against all traits associated with men. This must be kept in mind when having conversations around Islam and feminism, as it is necessary for us to consider the contexts in which we are speaking, and to whom; the average online Muslim won’t be able to parse the difference between academic verbiage and casual usage when the words used are the same. The way one person uses the word “patriarchy” as a neutral descriptor vs another who uses it as a sweeping condemnation make a massive difference in how thoughts and ideas are communicated and internalized. Preachers, activists, academics, and influencers spend far too much time talking past each other than engaging with other meaningfully precisely because of this mismatch of understanding and usage of vocabulary.

We must also be intelligent enough to distinguish between those actively calling to the secular values and definitions of feminism, those who just want to improve women’s rights but only know how to do so using popular feminist vocabulary, and those who are actively engaged with Islamic tradition to uphold Islamic values around women’s rights. If we are not willing to do this much, then we prove ourselves to be insincere in dealing with the very serious issues that plague our Ummah today.

With all this in mind, references to “feminism” in this paper will refer to secular value based movements, not just any conversations around women’s rights. Where relevant, I will specify between different types of feminist movements.

As we proceed, we must keep the following in mind: when injustice becomes a norm, resistance is inevitable. In a Western context, this means that feminism itself was inevitable, as a response to the oppression that besieged women at every level. From being viewed as property to finally being able to own property, from the right to access equal education to protections against discrimination, and more, one must acknowledge that the suffragist movement in Western countries resulted in real, tangible, positive results that benefit women – Muslim as well as non-Muslim – today. How far feminism has gone beyond resisting oppression and pursuing justice to go to another extreme is something else to be considered.

In Muslim contexts, we must realize that engaging with the lived realities and the discourse of feminism, shared via media and technology, was and is also inevitable. What is not inevitable is a future wherein all Muslims seeking solutions to gendered injustice turn to secular feminism – but only if we as a community are committed to putting in the work to oppose this injustice from within our own traditions.

What’s So Bad About Feminism?

This is the part where many people expect either long, convoluted discussions about Marxist and neoliberal constructions of societal hierarchy and power structures… or reductive memes about “feminists are happy to make coffee for their bosses but not their husbands!” I am here to do neither.

So what is so bad about feminism? Put simply: it is a framework that does not begin with the belief in a Creator who is the All-Knowing, the All-Wise, the Most Just Lawmaker. Feminism in its many mutations, and especially its most widespread and contemporary iterations, is mired in a worldview devoid of knowledge and belief in Allah and His Guidance. Discussions around morality and sexuality, gender and hierarchy, are permuted through a lens structured solely upon human-made ideas of good and evil. Feminism, along with every other philosophy that exists, is the result of humans trying to make meaning of the world without a foundation of Divine Guidance. It is especially important to note that in the Western context, secularism (and thus feminism) is inextricably tied to the history and consequences of the Enlightenment – a movement emerging from volatile Christian violence and that eventually resulted in cutting off the concept of “God” from public life, and consequently from private morality. Thus, a deliberate choice has been made to eradicate the role of God from the most fundamental aspects of human life, with unsurprising ramifications.

It is not surprising that so many women who have experienced or witnessed injustice and oppression at the hands of men think that men are inherently the problem, or that any social structure wherein men have authority is inherently harmful to women. After all, this is what their experience has taught them. From a secular perspective, religion has only ever been weaponized against women, to women’s profound detriment. Male-led societies have rarely resulted in the uplifting of women, but in their suppression and humiliation. This is the soil from which emerges a feminist hermeneutics of suspicion: a perspective that is predicated upon the assumption that all or most religious and cultural structures are created by and for male interests.2 One could argue that for those without Islam, this is a logical conclusion to come to. For those without Islam, there is no God who determines good and evil or promises judgment; no Divinely ordained set of ethics by which to live, to judge, to hold oneself or others accountable; no spiritual framework which women can turn to with confidence that their very existence is respected, honoured, and valued. In a secular worldview, there is no faith in a Hereafter wherein justice will be meted out. Justice itself is a concept entirely at the whims of the dominant powers that be, malleable and ever-changing with the latest political, social, or intellectual trend.

Islam, however, gives us a different foundation upon which to build our faith and our worldview. As Muslims, we believe completely in the Qur’an as the first source of Divine Guidance and Legislation; we believe in the role of the Sunnah as the second primary source of spiritual direction and practical rulings. We also have an understanding of the rich, varied corpus of traditional Islamic scholarship – a tradition that doesn’t exist as a fossilized entity to be followed blindly, but which continues to develop to this day. We also have a healthy recognition that our scholarship is not infallible; at the same time, through our Islamic tradition, we understand that rulings and structures have deeper meaning and wisdom. Legal authority or hierarchy does not automatically equate ontological superiority. Every question that is associated with feminism, from questioning female worth to discussions around sexual behaviour, from gender roles to finances, is ultimately answered within the framework of believing that Allah revealed a Divine structure for us to exist within. Most comfortingly, we understand as believers that where justice is not implemented in this world, it most certainly will be upheld in the Hereafter by the Most Just, on the Day when none can escape His Justice.

In summary, we must always remember that no matter the philosophy or ideology in question, anything that is not firmly grounded upon the Qur’an and Sunnah – and most importantly, upon taqwa of Allah – is not something that we can rely upon. While there may be some kernels of truth to be found, or some elements of accuracy in their ideas, they will always be fundamentally flawed. It is through Islam alone that one will ever find a truly comprehensive concept of justice.

The Trauma to Feminism Pipeline

It is a caricature that Muslim feminists are spoiled young women studying liberal arts at a liberal university on their fathers’ dime. To start with this assumption is already a sign of refusing to engage with the reality of Muslim women’s experiences. We have no statistics from within the Muslim community to tell us exactly how many Muslim women began identifying as feminist after going to university. It is also true that there are many women who have not experienced trauma who identify with the term ‘feminist,’ for various reasons. We do have considerable anecdotal evidence from Islamic scholars (both male and female) deeply engaged in grassroots da’wah work, who testify to the trend of Muslim women ascribing to the term “feminist” after enduring significant traumatic experiences.

These traumas are very real: witnessing or experiencing abuse at the hands of men evoking their status as qawwamoon; forced marriages; FGM3 being touted as a part of Islam4; being raised with the beliefs that women are inherently inferior to men in Islam5 6, that women do not enter Jannah except through the permission of a man, that Allah hates women, that women’s education is haraam7, and so on8. Fataawah, Islamic books, and masjid lectures abound labeling women as weak, emotional, incapable of rational thought or action, and constructing ideas of “wifely obedience” that go beyond the pale and into the realm of accepting abuse silently. When these are touted as the Islamic stance on women’s existence, how are Muslim women supposed to think well of Allah?

It is also common to find that people have ingrained assumptions about Islamic values and rulings based on faulty premises; for example, that hijab was mandated by men to control female sexuality, rather than that hijab is a command from Allah that is part of a larger vision of sexual ethics for all believers. Other ideas, such as teaching that women’s sole purpose in life is to become wives and mothers, do little to bring Muslim women closer to Islam.

Many girls grow up with a warped understanding of Islam itself, often because of their parents’ and communities’ lack of tarbiya. There is almost always a gross ignorance of Islam, Islamic values, ethics, frameworks, and rulings. The conflation of culture (whether South Asian, Arab, or otherwise) with Islam has been a massive source of confusion, pain, and injustice for Muslim women around the world. These traumas become a motivating force to push Muslim women away from Islam.

It is only understandable that girls and women who are not raised to believe in their inherent worth as believers in the sight of Allah, who are excluded from worshipping Allah in His Houses, whose understanding of their existence revolves around sentiments of disgust and anger, will inevitably question these premises. It also understandable that, when penalized for asking questions in the first place (as happens to many women who sincerely go to scholars with their questions), these women will seek answers from outside of our tradition in an attempt to reconcile their fitri understanding that the Most Just Creator could never condone such vile injustices.

Indeed, an oft-ignored element of the phenomenon of Muslim women identifying with the label of feminism is that the Muslim community as a whole has demonstrated a consistent refusal to meaningfully deal with these issues from the ground up, on a regular basis. Many Muslim women who ask questions or challenge our community’s status quo are immediately vilified as “feminists” trying to undermine Islam even when they explicitly say they’re not feminists and don’t identify with feminism (a common challenge faced even by traditionally trained women Islamic scholars!). When faced with such antagonism from other Muslims, many of these women actively choose to identify as feminists, since their attempts to engage from within using a solely Islamic-based terminology yielded no change or benefit. Using the language of feminism gives them the opportunity to tap into wider discussions, address certain phenomena with more specific vocabulary, and utilize existing research and social work that has been done regarding women’s issues.

If Muslims are sincere about addressing the problems of feminism within our community, then it must happen proactively, not reactively. That is to say, it is not effective or meaningful to spend thousands of hours debating “feminism as deviance”; what will prevent a mass exodus of Muslim women from looking outwards for solutions will be to aggressively deal with our community’s problems from a firmly grounded perspective in the Qur’an and Sunnah. AlHamdulillah, we are beginning to see this work being done in various capacities, but the reality is that much more work is needed in this regard – especially in light of the red pill ideology permeating many spaces and doubling down on justifying the harms done to Muslim women in the name of Islam.

I can speak to all the above very personally: this was precisely part of my journey as a Muslim woman, first reeling from the immense personal distress of being in a toxic marriage characterized as “Islamic,” and then confronted by a communal refusal amongst Muslims to even acknowledge all the ways that our faith is weaponized against women. The more I tried to point to the Deen as a solution to the very real problems that we have as a community, the more Muslims were hostile to even recognizing those problems, and resorted to labelling me (and other Muslim women trying to do the same) as “feminists.” Ironically, this pushed me directly towards engaging with feminist discourse, which was problematic in many ways. In hindsight, there were many perspectives and ideas that I shared that I now regret; despite having some familiarity with the Islamic sciences, I was not well grounded enough to be able to identify some of feminist philosophy’s fundamental flaws and the ways it would impact my way of thinking. Often without realizing it, I found myself absorbing ideas that were not in keeping with our faith; even as I was cognizant of certain fundamental principles of Islam, I found myself subconsciously absorbing attitudes and perspectives that did not align with those principles. It has taken years of personal error, spiritual growth, and increased learning to step away from the vortex and understand more deeply how wrong things can go when one is attached to the wrong framework.

My experience as a conservative Muslim woman who gravitated toward feminism in response to oppression in the name of “traditional Islam” has reinforced the urgent need for the Ummah to seriously engage with the recurring harms Muslim women identify in our thought and practice. Had Muslim leadership and communities meaningfully addressed the dhulm perpetuated in our spaces, many women (including myself) would never have been spurred towards other methods of dealing with our community’s problems.

After years of reflection, research, lived experience, and spiritual growth, I am more convinced than ever that the ultimate solutions to the Ummah’s internal and external struggles—personal and spiritual alike—lie within Islam itself. External ideologies can never offer the holistic answers we require. However, I also believe – just as emphatically – that unless the Ummah engages Muslim women’s concerns with seriousness, nuance, and accountability for our collective failures, we will continue to see Muslim women turning to the philosophies of feminism in search of justice and dignity.

Victims of Modernity

That’s not to say that every Muslim woman who finds herself turning towards feminism is a victim of abuse or gross cultural practices. Sometimes she’s a victim of modernity – no different from the many Muslim men wandering about who are also suffering from this affliction (though their diseases remain either undetected or simply considered not as serious).9

Man or woman, the quality of the average Western Muslim’s Islamic upbringing leaves much to be desired. When we already contend with statistics that show that only about 42% of American Muslims even pray five times a day, can we really have high hopes that the majority of young Muslims are being raised with a robust, holistic knowledge of Islam itself? How many Muslims, male or female, have been taught to understand Islam as a systematic, structured way of life? How many young Muslims have even a rudimentary awareness of the development of the Islamic sciences, let alone how rulings around hijab or other gendered matters came to be? To expect that Muslim women should somehow know the finer details of these scholarly discussions while their male counterparts do not, and to accuse such women of disrespecting our tradition when they simply do not know, is a double standard that only does our Ummah damage to uphold.

Coupled with the lack of thorough Islamic upbringing is the absorption of modern secular liberal values, whether through the education system, entertainment and media, or simply the society that Western Muslims are raised in. This, too, is part of a larger, overarching concern that exceeds the scope of this paper, yet is required to be considered more deeply: should Muslims really be content with settling in nonMuslim lands and raising our children in cultural and intellectual environments that we are not preparing them to contend with appropriately? Muslim parents bear a great burden around the tarbiya that they provide – or do not provide – to their children, and this has endless repercussions on the state of the Muslim Ummah at large.

A common issue specifically around discussions of feminism and Islam is the projecting of modern secular liberal values upon Islam itself, with little to no understanding that secular values – feminist or otherwise – are built upon a socio-theological and historical context that is utterly different from Islam and devoid of the presence of Allah. There is rarely an awareness of how feminism was used as a colonial tool to dismantle Muslim societies as part of the effort to portray the West as inherently superior and rational, while Islam was belittled as being a backwards, oppressive faith.

Statements like “Islam is a feminist religion!” and “Prophet Muhammad was the first feminist!”10 are predicated upon understandings of “justice,” “freedom,” and rights discourse that are distinctly divergent from the understandings of those same words within the Islamic spiritual-legal tradition. Questions of authority, marriage, sexual consent, abortion, and all the other trigger topics are then picked apart and understood through an intellectual paradigm that is utterly discordant with an Islamic worldview.

Perhaps most insidiously, this absorption of Western frameworks results in a type of internalized Islamophobia. There is a reduction of Islam to a private spirituality and of “Muslim-ness” as a cultural identity, rather than a holistic, publicly lived worldview and lifestyle that includes the public, the private, the domestic, the political, the social, the cultural, the ritual, and more. A sense of Western exceptionalism arises, one in which there is an assumption of Western secular values as a universal truth and superior moral system over Islamic truth, despite the constant state of flux of Western secular values.11

In these circles, it is not uncommon to find an Othering of religious Muslims as backwards and misogynist; sometimes the racism comes out blatantly by using terms such as “Taliban” or “Wahhabi” as slurs against Muslims seen as too conservative. The concept of Islam as the ultimate, timeless Truth revealed by the All-Knowing and Most Just Lawmaker is replaced by the blind, implicit belief that contemporary Western mores are the sole arbiter of what is right, what is moral, and what is just. From here on out, it is all too easy to slip from into perennialism, and from there into atheism itself.

Not the Intersectionality We’re Looking For

A consequence of being steeped in secular liberal discourse is that from well-meaning discussions around human rights and oppression, a sharp left turn is taken into the weeds of social justice warrior12 rhetoric. While it is understandable that Muslims seek allyship amongst others who will support our rights (especially in the age of ongoing illegal detainments, Zionist targeting, and endlessly increasing Islamophobia from the right wing and centrist left alike), we have sadly taken to unsavory bedfellows.

Moving beyond understanding the concept of intersectionality as it applies to certain valid spheres,13 there is an embrace of intersectionality with all elements – most notably the LGBTQ movement and its push to not just normalize homosexuality, but to celebrate it. The intersectionality of LGBTQ issues with wider rights discourse meant that Muslims looking for support for our civil rights were compromised by the expectation to change our own moral stances. It wasn’t enough for us to simply acknowledge that yes, LGBTQ people are entitled to the same legal rights and protections that everyone is supposed to have in a secular society. We were expected to move into the realm of explicit support for their causes, too; that our morality was now to mirror their ideas of morality (or lack thereof). To defy this was to be labeled bigoted, hateful, and essentially confirming racist stereotypes of Muslims as backwards, savage, and a threat to enlightened Western civilization.

As a community, we witnessed the snowball effect of this intersectionality. A blurring of sensibilities and the desensitization of our Islamic moral beliefs around sexuality have led to egregious public displays of utterly unacceptable nonsense. The examples are endless: from Ilhan Omar, a hijabi woman, dancing at Pride Marches to claims that “Islam has always had a place for homosexuality and gender fluidity!”; Scott Kugle’s laughable attempt at re-interpreting the Qur’an to allow for homosexuality; organizations like HEART aggressively attacking Muslims who uphold the Islamic prohibitions against homosexuality; blaming the political right for traditional Islamic stances against a range of issues from abortion to homosexuality, and more. At a theological level, the complicating of and rejection of “patriarchal heteronormativity” has resulted in explicit blasphemy: Rashida Tlaib publicly declaring that “my Allah is a She,” echoing the likes of Amina Wadud and others (who clearly missed the memo about Allah’s chosen way to reference Himself in the Qur’an14). Ominously, the LGBTQ cause has been weaponized by Western development and humanitarian aid organizations as an imperialist tool against Muslims.

The Qur’an and Sunnah are rendered sacrifices on the altar of intersectionality. An Islamic worldview is perceived as not just moot, but shameful. Contemporary ethics are projected onto Islam; Islam no longer defines the foundation of morality, but is expected to meet the standards of Western society on any given day, regardless of how quickly the wind blows in another direction. For those of us who still believe deeply in social justice work (as we should, in keeping with Islamic ethos), it is imperative that we do this work while firmly grounded in Islamic principles. Imam Dawud Walid’s book, “Towards Sacred Activism,” provides a solid foundation of how to navigate social justice activism without falling into the precarious pitfalls of inadvertently supporting belief systems that profoundly contradict the very foundations of our faith.

Social Media Arrogance, Social Reality Consequences

There is another place where we see the frameworks and language of feminism used to create a Frankenstein’s monster of discourse around Islam and women’s rights: the Internet. Social media, particularly on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, have become a breeding ground for anyone and everyone to grab a mic and start pontificating on what they think Islam says about Islam, women, and every other topic under the sun. While Dawah Bro Inc. is perhaps most easily identified as an ugly subculture of the Muslamic Internet, they are just one side of the toxic social media coin. The other side of the coin is what can perhaps be labeled as Muslim Girl Boss : flooding social media feeds with sound bytes claiming that “Islam says wives don’t have to do anything!” or “Khadijah (ra) was a CEO!” or “talking about hijab is spiritual blackmail!”15

This particular genre of social media influencers consists of individuals who have no traditional background in Islamic studies, yet feel confident enough with their secular educational backgrounds to speak on Islamic matters. This is particularly dangerous, as secular educational training – even in “Islamic studies” – is a wildly different worldview than that of genuine Islamic knowledge. Even those who claim to reference fiqh tend to have little or no understanding of usool al-fiqh, the differences between madhaahib and their internal structures, and the greater holistic legal and ethical considerations of the Shari’ah.

The result is that – whether Ted Talk or podcast, YouTube short or viral TikTok video – the sweeping claims being made are both wildly incorrect and cringe-inducing. Unfortunately, they also snag hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views; generate endless comments; are stitched by other content creators; and contribute to a Frankenfiqh discourse in Muslim online spaces that has no concern for the depth and nuance of true Islamic scholarship. Not coincidentally, these takes also reflect a very particular set of worldviews: one based on secularism, individualism, capitalism, and pop feminism.

Just as Dawah Bro Inc. thrives on creating toxic perspectives around gender roles and relationships, where women are caricatured as greedy, vindictive, and deceitful towards innocent men, Muslim Girl Boss creates its own warped reality. Women who do not share aspirations of shattering corporate glass ceilings are demeaned as brainwashed baby breeders; relationships built on mutual reciprocity, albeit presenting in “traditional” ways such as husbands as breadwinners and wives attending to the domestic sphere, are recreated as inherently dangerous to women.

The weaponization of pop-therapy vernacular (not to be confused with valid therapeutic interventions!) is used to convince women that normal marital miscommunications and disagreements are equivalent to abuse. Emotional validation is given priority over all else, including personal accountability. Fiqh of marriage is dismissed wholesale as misogyny from classical scholars, to be rejected in favour of contemporary secular relationship norms (despite the erratic and fickle nature of the latter). Rather than fostering healthy discussions around gender roles and interactions in society, those immersed in pop-feminist spaces create an environment of suspicion and hostility towards those perceived as supporting a patriarchal structure within the Muslim community.

Even the use of terminology such as “patriarchy” and “misogyny” is devoid of nuance, often swapped interchangeably for one another without pausing to consider the implications. More dangerously, those who have some passing familiarity with Islamic vocabulary wield technical Islamic jargon in a manner that strips the phrases of their legal context, leaving viewers with wildly incorrect conclusions that are attributed to the Shari’ah. Many Muslim women walk away from this content feeling as though they cannot trust traditional Islamic scholarship, while also feeling justified in believing that Islam does, in fact, conform to modern 21st century Western ideals. Endless videos fill the algorithm with warnings that Islamic scholarship is a behemoth of misogyny to be rejected, that Islam itself is little different from Christianity or Judaism, that the structures of the Islamic sciences are a house of cards to be swept away.

These social media personalities do a lot more than just undermine the role of traditional Islamic scholarship; they also construct a culture of pseudo-intellectualism (characterized, ironically, by significant ignorance) and heightened antagonism between Muslim men and women. Rather than shedding light on Islamic law’s nuanced approach to all matters – including gender roles, responsibilities, and rights – they flatten the discourse into one of patriarchy vs feminism, of male oppression vs female victimhood. In their professed quest to enlighten the public about all things Islam and women, they muddy the waters of intellectual integrity, nuanced knowledge, and Ummatic allyship in the cause of justice for men and women alike.

These online dumpster fires don’t just stay online – they leak into the real world, causing young Muslim men to gravitate towards false machismo under the guise of Islamic masculinity and quoting Andrew Tate, while Muslim women grasp for responses that reject what is clearly poisonous to the Ummah’s soul. Unfortunately, many of those responses contain just as much poison, especially the increasingly common rejection of ahadith as a source of Islamic authority, based on accusations of misogyny and corruption. Muslim men and women view each other with suspicion even as they try to get married (to one another!), struggle to find alignment in religious values (despite sharing the same deen), and clash even in masjid spaces as polarizing views are weaponized on the minbar and divide the community16. There is little sense of believing men and believing women as allies of one another, seeking Allah’s Pleasure and to establish justice in the Ummah and around the world.

The phenomenon of these influencers reflects two very dangerous patterns of behaviour: the first is the sheer arrogance of speaking on matters of Islam without actual Islamic knowledge gained from traditional study; and the second is a culture of presumption that anyone can speak on religious matters, regardless of their training (or lack thereof). Bluntly speaking, this is a type of spiritual disease; one which comes with widespread, dangerous social consequences alongside the negative impact on their own spiritual states. By putting themselves in the position of speaking on such matters as Islamic law and ethics, these influencers are presenting themselves as experts – rather than directing their audiences towards those who truly are qualified to do so, including numerous female scholars with genuine traditional training and qualifications in the Islamic sciences.

It is imperative that as a collective, Muslims who have genuine concerns around women’s rights and issues concerning women do not turn to social media shills as figures of authority or influence. We must not enable their ignorance and their hubris; we must not mistake their grifts for grassroots work; we must not reward their attention seeking with our hits, views, and stitches. Instead, we must reorient ourselves to the actual methodology of seeking knowledge. Pursuing real-work change must take place from within our own tradition, not from a shaky framework cobbled together from colonialism, secularism, capitalism, individualism, feminism, and the millions of others -isms bogging down our intellectual processes and fogging our cultural filters.

From the Streets to the Ivory Towers

Most Muslims are “average” Muslims, and you don’t have to be a university graduate to be impacted by the factors that we discussed in the previous sections. Lack of Islamic knowledge, absorbing ideas around Western secular superiority, and being chronically online are all issues to be found amongst the everyday Muslim. Feminism is just one growth of the ugly morass that is the Western sociopolitical hegemony that has, alas, infected the entire world.

But for those who have gone past social media soundbytes and found themselves immersed in deeper explorations of feminism and Islam, what needs to be known about that beast colloquially known as Muslim feminism? How have the discussions in the ivory towers of academia trickled their way onto our streets, and how are Muslim women impacted when we pick up books penned addressing the topic of Islam and women? While there are endless articles, webinars, and YouTube lectures pontificating on feminism and its impacts on Muslims, there is very little actual understanding in the Muslim community of what and how feminism in a Muslim context emerged, developed, and continues to influence others – and what isn’t feminism no matter how much one tries to make it so.

As someone who used the label of ‘feminist’ for many years, I am the first to note that most people embroiling themselves in these discussions don’t know what they’re talking about. The vast majority of people who use the term feminist have not studied feminism, are not even aware of its long (often sordid) history, or the confusion of thought trends ascribed to feminism, and even more rarely have read works by Muslim feminist authors. Over the years, however, I have taken the time to actually read works by notable Muslim feminist academics and developed a much deeper understanding of the fundamental theological flaws behind “Muslim feminism.” It is only by engaging with these works, rather than relying on flimsy stereotypes, caricatures, and outdated ideas of what “feminist” discourse entails, that we can most effectively address the very real, very dangerous beliefs undergirding the entire structure.

Many women find themselves picking up copies of Amina Wadud or Fatima Mernissi’s books at some point or another – sometimes as required readings in a university religions class, and sometimes out of desperation, in search for anything to more seriously address their questions around Islam and women (especially if they were already berated by imams for daring to ask those questions in the first place!). Unfortunately, this reading is usually done without a solid understanding of aqeedah, tafseer, the development of fiqh, or Islamic scholarship in general. Without a grounding in the Islamic sciences, such readers are left unable to identify just how deeply problematic, and wildly incorrect, these authors’ foundational premises and ultimate conclusions are.

The next part of this article will examine the ideological structures underpinning the field of Muslim feminism in academia, key figures and their contributions to the field, and the necessity of effective responses to these ideas.

References

Ahmed, L. (1992). Women and gender in Islam. Yale University Press.

Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford University Press.

Asad, T. (2018). Secular Translations: Nation-state, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason. Columbia University Press.

Badran, M. (1995). Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt. Princeton University Press.

Badran, M. (2009). Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences. Oneworld Publications.

Ezaydi, S. (2026). The Othered Woman: How White Feminism Harms Muslim Women. Pluto Press.

Hidayatullah, A. A. (2014). Feminist Edges of the Qur’an. Oxford University Press.

McLarney, E. A. (2015). Soft Force: Women in Egypt’s Islamic Awakening. Princeton University Press.

Mubarak, H. (2022). Rebellious Wives, Neglectful Husbands: Controversies in Modern Qur’anic Commentaries. Oxford University Press.

Rahnama, S. (2025). The Future Is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria. Cornell University Press.

Related:

ShaykhaTalk: Female Scholarship Or Feminism?

Addressing Abuse Amongst Muslims: A Community Call-In & Leadership Directives | The Female Scholars Network

 

1     Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose” (1983)2    This concept will be further examined in part 2 of this series, specifically in the context of feminist academic works in relation to Islamic scholarship.3    Female genital mutilation: the removal of some or any part of the vulva, especially the clitoris, as practiced in various regions of the world4    This is a very different discussion from female circumcision, around which there are many contentious discussions in our Islamic legal tradition. 5    https://tafsir.app/ibn-uthaymeen/33/356    https://www.islamweb.net/en/fatwa/381173/equality-between-men-and-women7    https://wifaq.org.za/?p=192878    https://fataawa.co.za/talks-by-yasmin-mogahed/9    Common practices include abandoning salah, consuming porn, engaging in zina, normalizing riba, outright apostacy, and more. However, these issues are rarely brought up with the same intensity and repetition brought to discussions about Muslim women.10     Interestingly, the first documented use of this phrase came from a Muslim man in Algeria, Cherif bin Larbi Cadi, who sought to rebut colonial attacks on Islam (Rahnama, 2023, pg. 89).11    Consider topics like the age of consent and the concept of consent; what was “decent” two or three decades ago compared to what is acceptable now; ideas around gender roles, family structure, and more. See here and here.12    Not to be confused with the term ‘social justice’ itself, a term which was used long before the current iteration of online discourse, as can be seen in Syed Qutb’s work “Social Justice in Islam” (1953).13    I.e. Allying with various groups for political causes that do not fundamentally compromise our theology or moral values 14    And, of course, keeping mind that Allah is neither male nor female, and thus the discussion need not be taken any further than that! 15    Nor does it help that Dawah Bro Inc. feeds into this with their own “fiqh doesn’t care about your feelings!” takes that, ironically, are equally as ignorant as the Girl Bosses, no matter how much they try to dress it up in the legal jargon of Islamic jurisprudence.16    for example, by welcoming spiritual abusers back into positions of authority

The post Muslims and the F-Word: Feminism, Dhulm, and Jahiliyyah appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Michael Mann gives a selective reading of history during Mount Scopus visit.

After over 800 days of displacement, we began the massive project of restoring our home – only to live through another Israeli bombardment.

Hotel did not allow two Muslim women to wear full-body bathing suit, which has become bugbear of European far right

An Austrian court has found an alpine hotel’s ban on burkinis discriminatory, a politically explosive ruling in a country where the far right is on the rise.

The full-body bathing suit worn by some Muslim women has become a bugbear of the European far right, which has campaigned to restrict Muslim dress in public spaces.

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Government’s former extremism adviser sounds alarm as idea that diversity is harmful becomes ‘mainstream view’

Two in five Britons believe Muslims cannot integrate into British society and more than half believe the country’s national identity is disappearing due to “diversity”, a report authored by a former government adviser on extremism has found.

Sara Khan, who stood down in 2024 as the UK’s first counter-extremism commissioner, said such views contrasted sharply with accompanying findings that showed 85% of Muslims “favour integration”.

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Emails reveal push at press freedom group to exclude Palestinian journalists based on political criteria.

Asem Alnabih speaks from Gaza about Trump’s Board of Peace concentration camps and what people around the world can do to help Palestinians.

Michael Sanders (Armie Hammer) walks into a hospital room to “talk sense” into a rape victim

Citizen Vigilante is not only a vicious film, it is an extraordinarily stupid film. Directed by Uwe Boll, the German director behind the films Rampage and Darfur (previously best known for making video games into movies), it stars Armie Hammer (real name Armand Hammer, like the abrasive smokers’ toothpaste) as a former American army officer who goes around an unnamed European city (though it is mostly shot in Zagreb, Croatia) with an automatic pistol issuing homilies about fairness and the rule of law in between dispensing violent ‘justice’ to criminals and the judges who let them off, while posting pixellated videos on social media, castigating the ‘takeover’ of western society by immigrants and the “woke left”, proclaiming that he is doing this for the people “until they learn to do it themselves”. His exploits are interspersed with amateurish fake news footage as a breathless female presenter tells us about the immigrant crimewave and how women are afraid to walk the streets or let their children play outside as well as admiring social media videos saying “we need someone like him in Canada/Germany/wherever”. The film can be watched on YouTube for free at present: [1], [2].

The plot is detailed on the film’s Wikipedia entry. Hammer’s character kills three racketeers who had been planning to raid his shop and burn it down. An Interpol chief appears on TV, suggesting that the vigilante is part of some sort of Russian- and Chinese-backed international terrorist cell; meanwhile, Mr Toothpaste pays the bus fare of three local yobs who had refused to pay before delivering one of his lectures on fairness. He visits a badly-injured rape victim in hospital who initially tells him she wants her attackers imprisoned for the rest of their lives; when he explains what going to trial would mean and asks “do you want justice?”, she says yes. A group of armed police make their way to his flat while he has a worker in one of his brothels perform a sex act on him before he tells her to open the windows when clients shower, to stop mould growing on the walls. A police SWAT team raid his flat and find he has built himself a mini fortress with two weapons protruding; police open fire when he refuses to surrender, he fires on them and a number are killed. Later on, when the building is raided in his absence, police open the lid of a booby-trapped container which explodes in their face, killing several more cops and injuring the Interpol chief.

He kidnaps a judge who had passed a comically ‘woke’ sentence on a group of young rapists and given a TV address describing the attackers as victims, driving him to a remote place before killing him in a way that was meant to look like suicide (though he took the weapon with him). He then goes to the home of one of the gang rapists where he, his parents and his sister are eating dinner. He tells the rapist to call the other perpetrators and tell them to come around on a pretext, while interrogating him and his family. The rapist said he was getting psychiatric help and would be better in the future, the sister makes excuses for him, saying the women in Europe go round in miniskirts with their breasts on display, while the father said he had the Qur’an and his family values. Mr Toothpaste responded that his values were archaic and that it was the bad people who had come out of their home countries, not the good. When the other perpetrators arrive, he ushers them into the room where the family are sitting, killing them in front of the family then murdering the family.

If there had been a genre of vigilante movies already, this would stand as a parody of it with only a couple of changes. The sheer hypocrisy of Hammer’s character undermines his ruthless righteousness. He is a scoundrel, a brothel owner, a slum landlord, a cop killer. Despite the rage about Muslim immigrants and all their criminal ways, Mr Toothpaste is an immigrant himself (he calls himself a ‘citizen’ but is not) and performs all but one of the murders in this film. While some may approve of the rapists’ killings (or laying low the thugs he met on the bus, after later coming across them robbing someone for their mobile phone), nobody would agree that someone believing or repeating rape myths — myths widely believed in western society as well as among some immigrants — makes it acceptable to kill them. It is also not true that it is mostly migrants who do this, or that there is no legal redress when judges pass ridiculously lax sentences: in this country, two juvenile rapists had their community sentences increased to custodial ones only last week after a public outcry led to an appeal. In the Netherlands, two men in their 40s, one a former police officer, were acquitted of the rape of a 17-year-old girl because she did not resist or make her lack of consent obvious enough (that case is also going to appeal). In much of Europe where the Napoleonic Code prevails, even acquittals in lower courts can be overturned by higher courts, unlike in the UK. The closest incident I can think of to the opening murder scene (where a woman was senselessly murdered by a stranger in front of her toddler son) was the murder of Rachel Nickell in London in 1992, the perpetrator of which was a white man, Robert Napper. (Some might compare it to the murder of Iryna Zarutska on a North Carolina commuter train last year, which Uwe Boll has alluded to in interviews, but that happened after this was filmed.)

The scene of the police raid on Hammer’s character’s flat is also pretty ludicrous. In most developed countries the police, having gained access to a dwelling where a gunman was holding them at bay, would not just open fire when he failed to surrender at the first time of asking. There would be a siege, and there would be negotiations and only if he posed an immediate threat, by aiming a gun at them for example, would they fire at him. What happens in the street is different because a gunman in the street can injure bystanders (not to say that unjust killings do not happen in that situation). Some of the right-wing commentary supporting the film call the slain officers “corrupt police”, but in this case there was no corruption as such. They weren’t on the side of the rapists. They were trying to arrest an armed, violent serial killer.

The plot and the behaviour of the main character in Citizen Vigilante reflects Uwe Boll’s history as a maker of gamer films. It is a gamer’s fantasy, roaming around with a machine pistol, beating up baddies like a 21st century Terminator, shooting dead people who just get in the way: not only the actual criminals but their families and the police too. There is no room for subtlety: the police are not just acting in a system which doesn’t always deliver the degree of justice we might want, no: they’re baddies too and have to be blasted with the Uzi or incinerated. It is also extremely racist, with all the criminals being foreign in one way or another and mostly Middle Eastern. It plays up to assumptions about Arab society, the idea that Muslims newly arrived in the West (the family killed at the end are understood to be Syrian) will have never seen a woman not in an abaya and headscarf, at least; most of these countries have Christian populations, and Muslims who are not that religious, and there will be plenty of women dressed similarly to those in the West and, in some places, in bathing attire. This idea that they would never have seen a less than fully dressed woman before, or that this would produce uncontrollable sexual desire, is just not true.

The film is racist not because it posits that migrants do not have the right to rape, or should be punished when they do. It’s racist because it pretends that migrants, people perceived as ‘foreign’ (not including white Americans), are the only criminals of significance, that they are the only people who have objectionable attitudes to women, or who would excuse rape or blame the victims. (He does see two white men try to drug their dates, and swaps their drinks around so the men get the drug instead, but doesn’t shoot them.) Racist responses talk contemptuously of it being ‘dangerous’; the reason it is dangerous is because we have had more than one outbreak of violence in the UK since 2024 where organised mobs descended on towns as a result of mere rumours of crimes being committed by immigrants, on one occasion burning people out of their homes, running riot and threatening people because of the colour of their skin, and it is only a matter of time before these mobs kill someone and it might be someone completely innocent, and the rumour completely baseless. “Germany Banned Citizen Vigilante — are millions of men about to copy him?!”, gushes Nick Buckley MBE. Wouldn’t that be wonderful, eh? It’s all over YouTube and people are watching it for free, so Boll isn’t making any money out of it, but this could prove to be the 21st century’s Birth of a Nation (the 1915 film that inspired the revival of the Ku Klux Klan) which is a good reason to keep it out of cinemas.

BNP canvassers in Burnley, 2012

A week ago, a report on a maternity care scandal in the Nottingham area was published. The Ockenden Maternity Review had been set up in May 2022 “following significant concerns raised regarding the quality and safety of maternity services at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH) and concerns of local families”; this review replaced a prior regionally-led review as a result of families’ concerns. The week before, Rupert Lowe, founder and currently sole MP of the Restore Britain party, published his report from what he called his “Rape Gang Inquiry” (PDF), his crowd-funded inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal. Excerpts from that review have been published verbatim or uncritically summarised in posts on social media and Substack, often accompanied with complaints about how it was ‘ignored’ by the mainstream media; Ockenden’s review was, by contrast, front-page news, as was Baroness Amos’s review into maternity services nationwide, along with a high-profile resignation from its board. (The charity Rape Crisis has given its response here.)

I mention the two together because the Ockenden review represents how long an inquiry into a major regional scandal can take when done properly; the RGI report shows how quickly you can do it if you have reached your conclusion before you start. So many injustices have taken years to put right — Bloody Sunday, Hillsborough and the Grenfell Tower disaster spring to mind. Lowe’s report consists of a summary, a long section consisting of survivor testimony from the inquiry (usually with first names as pseudonyms, though some are identifiable having spoken publicly) and four profiles of ‘whistleblowers’. These include a former UKIP councillor, Caven Vines, who was successfully sued for libel by two Rotherham Labour MPs, John Healey and Kevin Barron, for claiming they knew about grooming gang abuse but did nothing (Lowe omits to mention the UKIP link). He also includes three long paragraphs on “Tommy Robinson”, without giving his real name (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), portraying him as a man persecuted by the police for “exposing grooming gangs” and for “speaking publicly” after forming the English Defence League, rather than rightly prosecuted for assaults, mortgage fraud, use of a false passport, stalking and harassment, and interfering in a grooming gang case in a way that could prejudice it (everyone in the media here knows that is against the law).

Lowe presents claims from politicians as fact. There is a page and a half about the situation in London, where to date there has been no prosecution of anyone for grooming gang activity but which he alleges “stands exposed as the epicentre of institutional denial in the grooming gang scandal” and where “the scale of abuse … was more catastrophic than anywhere else in the country”, an extraordinary claim. It is entirely possible that London is not free of grooming gangs, but to claim it is worse than anywhere else and has been somehow covered up really needs proof, not mere claims from a Tory councillor in Harrow and an ex-cop on a video posted by the Daily Express’s YouTube channel. London is the centre of the national media and if there was evidence of a lot of such abuse going on, it could easily have been reported on. Lowe alleges that the Metropolitan Police “announced a review of 9,000 child sexual exploitation cases”, inviting the reader to assume (wrongly) that CSE and grooming gang activity are synonymous. In a chapter outlining the “Islamic” influence on the gangs, he quotes liberally from a pseudonymous misery memoir by one Hannah Shah. Other unreliable sources include a Triggernometry podcast episode and various politically biased think-tank reports (Policy Exchange and Quilliam for example).

His chapter on the “Islamic influence” contains a long list of supposed issues with Islam (often flimsily-understood concepts) that are actually irrelevant to this situation, not only because they are simply inapplicable to the situation (for example, the discourse on slavery and the Barbary pirates, who were from North Africa, which is nowhere near Pakistan, and the victims were not slaves) but because the major players in the gangs were not particularly religious and just used distorted, selective readings of Islam to justify their behaviour. Every aspect of their behaviour and the modus operandi of the grooming gangs goes against many aspects of Islamic law: most obviously, the prohibition of consuming or supplying alcohol or other narcotics, sex outside marriage, pimping, rape, deception (such as forming relationships with vulnerable girls to lure them into the clutches of the gangs), coming between girls and their parents, using violence and threats to keep victims in their grip and prevent them living their own lives, among many other things. None of this is jihad; it’s just criminality. Lowe cites a Dr Hill  As for Al-Wala’ w’al-Bara’ (loyalty and disavowal), it’s quite likely that most of these men had never heard the term but as said the late mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdul-Aziz bin Baz, who took a hardline view of the concept, “Hating them and regarding them as enemies does not mean that you should mistreat them or transgress against them if they are not in a state of war with the Muslims”. Dr Hatem al-Haj gives a more nuanced view on the subject here.

Rupert Lowe makes no attempt at analysis beyond issues such as political correctness and fear of being perceived as racist. The various blogs and social media posts which parrot extracts from this report also relay this ‘analysis’ uncritically. To clarify, this was a reason some of the time but was not the reason all the time. As Maggie Oliver and others have mentioned, other reasons include laziness, political interference and classism and sexism within police forces and social work departments: the young victims were seen as difficult, uncooperative, “child prostitutes”, the authors of their own misfortune, among other things. Rape myths are common in society and police across the UK and overseas have been known to look for ways to dispose of rape complaints unless they meet common “classic rape” stereotypes; this was seen in the investigation into the “Black Cab rapist”, John Worboys, and at least one of his victims was posh (now married to Boris Johnson, no less), so when they are girls from troubled families or council estates, the response can be expected to be at least as bad. West Yorkshire detectives stubbornly refused to believe that the Yorkshire Ripper was a Yorkshireman, having heard a north-easterner boast of the crimes on tape, despite several of his victims telling them so. There is nothing for the police in his set of ‘recommendations’; no challenge to police sexism or misogyny (or classism). Cases of serving police officers abusing their partners and spouses and others backing them up, or committing sexual crimes and getting away with it for some time are legion. I guess a MacPherson report for women would be too woke; wouldn’t want to hurt the police’s precious morale, would we?

There was a time when the existence of grooming gangs were widely doubted, that they were believed to be a figment of propaganda. We now know the gangs themselves were real, but this report absolutely is propaganda. It takes survivors’ stories and presents a pre-made analysis and recommendations that are standard right-wing talking points. This report is not a substitute for a proper public inquiry; that will have to take into account factors this report does not touch because its purpose will be to prevent further such abuses and to protect children both at home and in care, not to be racist enough to satisfy podcasters and the Reform/Restore media or to justify the policies of one political party.

A Photo Essay by Tomohiro Oshima

 

Japan has never declared itself a country of immigration.

Through successive revisions of its immigration laws, the government has maintained that it “does not adopt an immigration policy.” It has absorbed foreign workers through the Technical Intern Training Program, drawn international students into its labor market, and refused to call any of it immigration. By the end of 2023, the number of registered foreign residents reached approximately 3.4 million1. Yet the majority remain institutionally precarious — suspended between economic necessity and legal exclusion.

Scholar Hidenori Sakanaka, a former director of the Tokyo Immigration Bureau, has long argued that Japan operates as a de facto country of immigration while refusing to officially call it one — absorbing foreign labor through side-door channels even as it denies any shift in national policy. The vacuum this creates is filled by religious communities, ethnic networks, and mosques.

A young girl pauses during Quran study at Masjid Istiqlal Osaka, in Nishinari Ward’s Kamagasaki district.

In Nishinari Ward, Osaka — in the district known as Kamagasaki — stands Masjid Istiqlal Osaka. “Istiqlal” means independence in Indonesian. True to its name, this mosque has built a network of mutual aid that operates independently of state institutions. Muslims from Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and elsewhere gather here to pray, study, celebrate, and sustain one another. Children learn the Quran alongside their Japanese homework; young couples marry under Islamic rites; newborns are held in aging hands.

Children sit on the floor of the mosque’s community hall during a weekend lesson.

A teacher guides a student through her Quran writing exercises, sharing a smile mid-lesson.

One of those newborns is called Minami — “south” in Japanese — because she was born in the south of Osaka. Her father is a diplomat, and the family will soon leave again. “She was born here,” her mother said quietly. “So this is part of her.”

A grandmother holds her grandchild at the mosque — the newest generation of a family built far from home.

A child holds a handmade paper basket, decorated with drawings of Indonesian sweets, during a community gathering.

A student looks up from her notebook during Quran study.

But the mosque’s function extends far beyond the rhythms of ordinary life. When the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake struck, Masjid Istiqlal opened its doors to displaced people — stocking halal food, opening its prayer space, and providing bedding. Japan’s official evacuation plans had made no provision for halal dietary requirements, prayer schedules, or language barriers. During COVID-19, the mosque distributed food to those who had lost income and facilitated vaccination for foreign nationals facing linguistic barriers to public health services. These are not acts of charity. They are acts of infrastructure.

Children sit together on the prayer hall floor between lessons.

Boys laugh together at the mosque — the next generation growing up in Kamagasaki.

Kamagasaki was built by Japan’s postwar economic miracle as a reservoir of day labor. As that generation disappears, young Muslim migrants are putting down roots in the same streets. Among them: a man from Indonesia who works at an elderly care facility in rural Wakayama, who recently brought his bride from home. “When we have children,” he said, “we will have to move — somewhere outside Osaka, where the schools are better.”

A bride signs the marriage certificate at Masjid Istiqlal Osaka, witnesses looking on.

A groom places a ring on his bride’s finger during their Islamic wedding ceremony at the mosque.

Japan did not decide to receive these people. Yet they are already here — raising the next generation, building community, putting down roots. The country is changing without having decided to change.

 

Related:

– Ramadan In India’s Capital: A Photo Essay

– Ramadan At The Uyghur Mosque: Community, Prayers, And Grief

1    The figure comes from Japan’s Immigration Services Agency. Their English-language report confirms 3,410,992 foreign residents as of the end of 2023 (see the chart on p.1): https://www.moj.go.jp/isa/content/930004452.pdf

The post Undecided Nation: How A Mosque In Kamagasaki Fills Japan’s Immigration Gap – A Photo Story appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Melat Kiros rattles political establishment.

Kids were slain, tortured and persecuted because of their Palestinian identity.

Israeli forces arrest “doctor of the poor,” health care activists in West Bank.

When life doesn’t go as planned, the lessons of Hudaybiyyah remind us to trust the wisdom of Allah, Al-Ḥakīm.

Allah Is Al-Ḥakīm

As human beings, one of the greatest challenges we face is trusting Allah’s wisdom when we cannot yet see the wisdom behind His decree. We often struggle to understand why events unfold as they do, particularly when circumstances seem contrary to our hopes and expectations. Yet Allah is Al-Ḥakīm — the One whose wisdom is perfect, whose decree is precise, and whose knowledge encompasses the past, the present, and what is yet to come. This reality is reflected throughout the Seerah, with the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah serving as one of the most compelling examples.

A Dream That Inspired Hope

Six years after the Hijrah, the Prophet ﷺ had a dream in which he and his followers entered Makkah to complete the ʿUmrah pilgrimage. Certain that this dream was a divine message from Allah, he shared the news with his Companions and arranged to travel to the Holy Sanctuary. Allah later revealed:

“Certainly has Allah shown to His Messenger the vision in truth: you will surely enter al-Masjid al-Ḥarām, if Allah wills, in safety, with your heads shaved or hair shortened, not fearing [anyone].”  (Qur’an 48:27)

For the Muslims, this journey was of profound significance. Years earlier, they had been forced to leave Makkah, abandoning their homes and families for the sake of Allah. Returning to their birthplace and the Kaʿbah filled them with hope and anticipation. The Prophet ﷺ, accompanied by approximately 1,400 of his Companions, entered the ritual state of iḥrām. Entering iḥrām with sacrificial animals demonstrated that their purpose was purely spiritual, and not military.

When Expectations Meet Reality

As the Muslims approached Makkah, they were looking forward to the opportunity to perform ʿUmrah. However, the Quraysh suddenly thwarted their hopes by denying them entry into the city. What started as a pilgrimage fueled by faith and optimism unexpectedly turned into uncertainty.

The Muslims made camp. As negotiations began and envoys were sent back and forth, the prospect of reaching Makkah became increasingly unlikely. Many of the Prophet’s companions felt a deep sense of disappointment; having left Madinah specifically to perform the Umrah, they now found their path blocked.

The atmosphere at Hudaybiyyah became significantly tense; as a result, the Prophet ﷺ dispatched ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān to Makkah. He was tasked with negotiating with the Quraysh to reassure them that the Muslims had come exclusively for the pilgrimage and not for warfare. ʿUthmān was an ideal choice for this role because of his high standing and strong tribal connections within the Quraysh leadership.

Confusion and anxiety soon spread among the Muslims after reports circulated that ʿUthmān had been killed. As tensions mounted, it was difficult to imagine that these very events would become the prelude to one of the greatest victories in Islamic history.

Little did they know that Allah, Al-Ḥakīm, the All-Wise, was subtly guiding every unfolding event towards a reality the Muslims could not yet perceive.

The Treaty That Felt Like a Defeat

Ultimately, discussions between the Muslims and the Quraysh led to a peace treaty, later known as the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah. However, several conditions seemed very unfavourable. One of these conditions was that the Muslims had to return to Madinah without completing their ʿUmrah pilgrimage. Having travelled with the expectation of entering Makkah, many found the outcome difficult to accept.

Among those who struggled most was ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb. Troubled by the terms of the treaty, he asked the Prophet ﷺ, “Are you not truly the Messenger of Allah?” The Prophet ﷺ replied, “Indeed, I am the Messenger of Allah, and I do not disobey Him, and He will never forsake me” (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī).

At that moment, ʿUmar could see only the apparent setback before him, while the Prophet ﷺ remained steadfast in his trust in Allah. His questions reflected not a lack of faith, but the struggle of a sincere believer seeking to understand what had not yet become clear.

Years later, he recalled that day with deep regret, devoting himself to prayer, fasting, charity, and other acts of worship to seek Allah’s forgiveness. His response powerfully reminds us that sincere believers may, at times, struggle to understand Allah’s decree. Nevertheless, true faith involves being humble before Allah and trusting in His wisdom even when it is not immediately apparent.

Amid the sorrow, another remarkable lesson emerged. Seeing the Muslims consumed by distress and confusion, the Prophet ﷺ consulted his wife, Umm Salamah. She suggested that he lead by example, performing the rituals himself in silence. When the Prophet ﷺ acted on her counsel, the Companions promptly joined him in performing the rites.

Umm Salamah’s wisdom resolved a difficult moment at Hudaybiyyah. The incident reflects the Prophet ﷺ’s noble character. Despite being the recipient of divine revelation, he deeply valued consultation, actively sought the counsel of others, and embraced wisdom wherever Allah placed it.

A Clear Victory

As the Muslims returned to Madinah, many struggled to accept the outcome of Hudaybiyyah. Their entry into Makkah had been denied, the terms of the treaty seemed unfavourable, and the long-awaited ʿUmrah pilgrimage had been deferred.

It was during this very journey that Allah revealed:

“Indeed, We have granted you a clear victory.” (Qur’an 48:1)

The revelation dramatically reshaped the narrative of Hudaybiyyah. How could an event marked by disappointment be described as a clear victory? This was the wisdom of Al-Ḥakīm, unfolding in a manner the Muslims could not yet comprehend.

The treaty ushered in a period of peace that paved the way for Islam to grow. In the years that followed, more people entered the faith than ever before.

Spiritual Insights for Muslims Today

Hudaybiyyah offers many timeless lessons for Muslims navigating uncertainty, disappointment, and delay. Among the most prominent are the following:

1. We Judge by the Present; Yet Allah Sees the Future

Many of us have experienced situations that initially seemed disappointing, only to realise later that Allah had placed goodness within them. The Companions could see only the disappointment of Hudaybiyyah. They had set out hoping to enter Makkah and complete their pilgrimage, yet found themselves returning home without fulfilling the purpose for which they had travelled. Allah, however, saw the victories that would unfold through the treaty. We all experience moments when life unfolds differently from what we had hoped. We may desperately want a particular job, hope for a certain opportunity, or make plans that seem entirely right to us, only for the door to remain closed.

Hudaybiyyah reminds us that we often evaluate events according to what we have lost, whereas Allah’s wisdom encompasses what those very events may yet bring about.

2. Faith Requires Obedience Before Understanding

The Treaty of Hudaybiyyah demonstrates the Companions’ profound love for the Prophet ﷺ and their commitment to Islam. Despite their dashed hopes, they followed his example, shaving their heads and completing the rites, trusting his judgement even when the wisdom of the treaty was not yet clear. There are times when we know what Allah requires of us, yet we struggle to see the wisdom behind it. Whether it is maintaining family ties after being hurt, persevering in prayer during hardship, or remaining patient when a duʿāʾ seems unanswered, as Muslims, we are called to trust Allah before we fully understand His decree.

Hudaybiyyah reminds us that obedience often precedes understanding.

3. The Perfection of Allah’s Wisdom

The reaction of ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb at Hudaybiyyah is a powerful reminder of the perfection of Allah’s wisdom and the constraints of human judgment. ʿUmar was not an ordinary believer; he was among the greatest of the Companions. The Prophet ﷺ praised his insight and virtues, and even said that if there were to be a prophet after him, it would have been ʿUmar. Yet despite his sincerity, wisdom, and faith, he struggled to comprehend the wisdom behind the treaty.

How often do we become convinced that a particular outcome is best for us, only to discover later that our perspective was incomplete? We may think that a particular opportunity, relationship, or plan will bring us happiness, yet Allah knows what we do not know. The example of ʿUmar reminds us that even the most sincere and insightful believers are limited in their wisdom, whereas Allah’s wisdom is perfect and all-encompassing.

If ʿUmar could not fully perceive Allah’s wisdom in that moment, how much more limited is our own understanding? Hudaybiyyah reminds us to approach Allah’s decree with humility, accepting that His wisdom is perfect and transcends our knowledge.

4. Women’s Contributions to the Prophetic Community

The role of Umm Salamah at Hudaybiyyah reminds us that women were active contributors to the Prophetic community and that the flourishing of the early Muslim community was shaped by the efforts of both men and women. Her wisdom helped guide the Muslims through a moment of profound difficulty and uncertainty.

How often do we benefit from the advice of a parent, friend, or teacher after initially overlooking their perspective? Umm Salamah’s role at Hudaybiyyah reminds us of the importance of listening to wise counsel and recognising the value that others can bring to our lives and communities.

The incident also reflects the esteem and high regard in which the Prophet ﷺ held women. Despite being the recipient of divine revelation, he sought and accepted Umm Salamah’s counsel, appreciating the wisdom of her advice. Hudaybiyyah also reminds us that insight and sound judgment are qualities that Allah bestows upon whomever He wills.

5. Allah’s Wisdom Often Becomes Clear Only with Time

The hidden virtues of Hudaybiyyah were not immediately apparent to the Companions. Only with the passing of time did they witness the peace, growth, and victories that flowed from the treaty. The incident reminds us to be cautious about judging Allah’s decree too quickly, for some of His greatest blessings only become apparent in hindsight. How often do we look back on a difficult period in our lives and become aware of blessings that we were unable to see at the time?

Conclusion

The incident at Hudaybiyyah stands as one of the clearest manifestations of Allah as Al-Ḥakīm, the All-Wise. What appeared to many of the Companions as a setback was, in reality, the beginning of one of the greatest victories in Islamic history.

The Companions saw the delay; Allah saw the victory.

They saw the obstacle; Allah saw the opening.

And they saw what was before them, while Al-Ḥakīm saw what was yet to come.

And therein lies a timeless lesson for every believer living through the uncertainties of life: trust in the wisdom of Al-Ḥakīm, even when it has not yet become clear.

Related:

Reconstructing Our Understanding of the Sīrah

Prophetic Guidance For An Exemplary Ramadan

The post Trusting Allah: Lessons from Hudaybiyyah appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Where do you watch a World Cup match in Nuseirat with just 10 minutes of electricity a day?

Unmarried man and woman whipped 21 times each because they had violated province’s version of Islamic law

A young couple in Indonesia’s conservative Aceh province have been publicly caned after a Sharia court convicted them of violating Islamic law by kissing during a TikTok livestream.

The court ordered the couple, a 22-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman, to be whipped with a rattan cane 21 times each for kissing without being married. At least 100 people witnessed the caning, carried out by a group of people wearing robes and hoods on a stage in Bustanussalatin City Park in Banda Aceh.

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Katharina von Schnurbein smears organizers of Rome Pride.

My name is Ahmad, but, thanks to Aunt Samah, people call me Johnny.

Does anyone seriously think this kind of amplification is harmless?

Elon Musk has long described himself as a “centrist”. He likes to pretend that he hasn’t changed his views; it’s the Democrats who have lurched to the left. He’s merely a free speech advocate; a self-styled “moderate” resisting the excesses of the “woke mind virus”.

But when you pay attention to his actual digital footprint – the tweets, the retweets, the algorithmic amplification – a very different, much darker picture emerges. The world’s richest person clearly isn’t interested in cultivating a neutral marketplace of ideas; rather, he has turned Twitter/X into a platform where far-right and racist content is repeatedly rewarded and amplified.

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Strong marriages are built on more than tawakkul – they’re built on honest conversations about money.

When Expectations Collide

Khadija, a 26 year old woman living in New York, has been searching for a marriage partner for a few years now and finally met someone she thought could marry. Her courtship with Khalid went really well for a month. She adored the fact that he was quite an ambitious man focused on serving the community with most of his free time.

Her own work as a teacher was a modest one, but she lived with her father so her own expenses were almost nothing, affording her a comfortable lifestyle. As they got closer to the marriage date, both of them began to realise that there were major differences in the way they were approaching life itself when they began to discuss the wedding ceremony.

She wanted to have the Nikah at the mosque, with a grand reception in a rented garden afterward.

He, on the other hand,  wanted something more modest, with a reception at his house with a total of 45 guests, as he preferred to spend the money on a down payment for a new house, which was not something he had consulted her about.

Neither person was acting in bad faith. The relationship ended because they had never taken the time to understand each other’s expectations. The disagreements were short but impactful and the two of them decided sorrowfully to end the courtship and what could potentially have been a wonderful marriage for the two of them.

The above is one among the many different stories that make up the Muslim marriage crisis that is swiftly proliferating the Ummah (especially in the West).  Many Muslim leaders, counselors, and researchers have expressed concern that divorce has become increasingly common among American Muslims (although comprehensive national data remain limited).

The reasons for this are many and cannot be limited to one issue alone. But what we do know is that money is among the biggest factors that lead to relationship/courtship breakdown.

Financial Incompatibilities and the Marriage Crisis

While statistics on this issue are difficult to come by,  estimates suggest that financial problems contribute to roughly 20–40% of divorces in the United States, making money one of the leading sources of marital conflict.  Estimates for the UK hover around the 30% mark.

To be clear, this is not due to the main earner of the house earning insufficiently (though that certainly contributes). Rather, it stems from a lack of communication around money in a relationship context that many of us are guilty of doing.

This is both an individual and a societal issue that we face. Many Muslim-majority cultures (South Asian, Arab etc.) are not fully comfortable with speaking about money (barring certain exceptions). This leads to people often avoiding this conversation (consciously or not) within their own marital contexts too. The justification at times that is given (especially by the God-conscious) is that marriage comes with its own Rizq and that we should have tawakkul regarding money matters.

However, while Tawakkul is an important attitude to have, it is not enough if it’s not supplemented by other steps. Tawakkul in Islam has never meant abandoning planning or difficult conversations. The Prophet ﷺ tied trust in Allah to taking the appropriate steps toward success. And no, this does not mean just working harder/smarter (which is also important).

Communicating Expectations

The most significant issue here is communication between the spouses. Aspiring couples should discuss finances at various stages of their courtship. They should begin with broader discussions about principles and values. As they move toward marriage, they should discuss their specific circumstances, expectations, and plans for the nikah and their first year together. Even after marriage, they should continue reviewing their financial situation and expectations regularly.

The details of this are something we discuss in a pre-Nikah guide that we at AML Finance developed.

These discussions are paramount to setting up a healthy marriage because of a key principle that many of us are often not taught: strong and collaborative marriages are built to last when couples can have hard conversations with each other.

Let’s say that again: marriages become strong when couples are not afraid to have honest and frank conversations about difficult subjects.

Struggling With Guilt and Shame

Conversations about money often trigger and bring out emotions such as guilt, shame and fear. Men especially struggle with not feeling adequate and having it all together (due to our expected role as providers) and are often coasting through marriages with their wives not understanding the financial health of their household.

The illusion of comfort and safety only breaks when circumstances change (sudden financial expenses like a new car, medical expenses etc.). This inevitably brings about much negativity and causes the couple to fight and lose trust in the other.

Our own parents are not always able to teach us how to have these conversations. Many of our parents entered marriage under very different economic and social circumstances. As a result, they may not have had to navigate some of the financial realities younger Muslim couples face today.

Issues like the rise of women working, higher levels of integration among younger generations in the West, a cost of living crisis and smaller families, among many others, are new and not something they know how to deal with easily, despite these having an impact on our financial stories.

Our Work and Introducing the Series

At AML Finance, we help people understand their financial backgrounds and navigate financial conversations during the courtship period. Through workshops and training—primarily in the UK—we work with couples from a variety of backgrounds. While our focus is on serving the Muslim community, we believe these principles can benefit families more broadly.

This article is the first in a series exploring the intersection of money and marriage. Future articles will address topics such as personal financial stories, the expectations men and women bring into marriage, modern realities like dual-income households and government-registered versus nikah marriages, and the often-overlooked issue of financial abuse.

Our hope is to encourage healthier conversations around money, helping couples protect their marriages from the whispers of Shaytaan and build stronger relationships rooted in trust, communication, and mutual understanding.

Related:

3 Urgent Financial Questions to Ask A Potential Spouse

Meaningful Money: How Financial Literacy Amplifies Your Giving

The post When Tawakkul Isn’t Enough: Why Financial Silence Hurts Marriages appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.