Islam: It’s Trending
Maybe the historians picking over the ashes of Western Civilisation will call it “Rapid Onset Religious Dysphoria”. Or at least that’s what I’m calling the sudden social media trend among ostensibly progressive, post-religious, sexually fluid activists to come over all Islamic all of a sudden.
That’s right parents: Put aside your fears thar your slightly autistic, awkward and friendless daughter is in her room online being convinced she’s actually a boy by a transgender non-binary in Portland. There’s every chance she’s in her room being convinced she’s a closet Muslim by a newly converted black activist from New York.
In a startling – at one level, but completely understandable at another level – move, there’s a huge trend towards taking on the veil among social media types since the event of Oct 8.
I know, I know, I should say Oct 7, but for some reason the huge desire to take on the veil has actually veiled what precipitated the Israeli invasion of Gaza, namely the murderous terrorist attacks of the 7th.
But, given all things woke and anti-Western (and increasingly antisemitic) there’s a huge hashtag jump in all things Islam, especially the veil.
As reported in The Free Press just last week, western women are taking it on and it’s trending on all of the important social platforms. Megan Rice on Tik Tok has gone all gushy over Islam, with coloured pens and sticky notes and everything
And as she says “I’m enjoying the read so far.” She must have learned Arabic real quick, it being the only language that the Quran really should be read in and all. My friend Rory, in a far-sighted move a couple of decades ago bought me a copy of the Quran. Every now and then I dip into it and think “Wow, how unlike the Bible that is.”
Silicon-Valley Islam
But then, that’s the point. In a helter-skelter rush to slough off all of the hated Western ideas that have so destroyed them and so gutted the planet of any integrity, the likes of Rice take on a cartoonish version of Islam; a social media-lite, Disneyland experience of an ancient religion that requires total immersion. It’s a Silicon Valley version of the faith; blended, reconstituted and resold to Westerners living in a world full of experience, but precious little meaning.
Yet Islam requires total obedience. And therein lies the problem. Islam is ostensibly a nod to Allah’s total will, no questions asked and quarters brooked. And it is done so in the context of culturally conservative communities that eschew the expressive individualism that the likes of Rice are so committed to.
The likes of Rice are committed to the “iWorld” that Dale Kuehne speaks of, in which the individual trumps the community and does what he or she or they wish to do. Which doesn’t fit so well in the ‘tWorld” or the traditional world in which Islam lives and breathes.
I am not sure that a young woman doing what she wishes to do in order to express herself always has a happy ending in many traditional Islamic communities. In fact, as I read the papers, I know that’s not the case.
Yet as The Free Press reports:
There are currently scores of TikTok hashtags that include the word revert, including #WhiteRevert (1.6 million views), #BlackRevert (174K views), #JewishRevert (131K views), and #JapaneseRevert (278K). Biggest of all is the simple hashtag #revert, with 2.9 billion views, followed by #RevertMuslim (1.4 billion), and #MuslimRevert (525 million).
The term “revert”, by the way, refers to anyone who becomes a Muslim. You don’t convert to Islam, because it being the foundational religion of the world upon which all other corrupt religions including Christianity and Judaism (both a great deal older btw), are mere barnacles to be scraped off.
And within days Rice was wearing a hijab, and coming across all funky online. As The Free Press reports:
By November 10, she first appeared on TikTok in a hijab, and the number of her followers had doubled. (It currently stands at 865,000.) The next day, Rice took her shahada, the Islamic ceremonial profession of faith, officially converting to Islam.
So a month after October 7 (if you still believe such a date existed) Megan Rice is full blown veil and reverted. And of course the kudos and cultural cachet has been huge. Just like the love bombing that comes when a young woman comes out as trans, the online community went over the top with “you go girl” and all that stuff.
And of course there’s no cost to her for taking on the veil. It’s all reward. And it’s all so cute too. There’s another TikTok influencer who posts pictures of her newly bought Quran replete with sticky notes and coloured sparkly pens, no doubt for highlighting passages such as “Surah 9:5: “Then kill the disbelievers (non-Muslims) wherever you find them, capture them and besiege them, and lie in wait for them in each and every ambush.”
And here I was thinking Saul killing the Amalekites was all awkies and stuff, and now I’ve just gone and gotten a hall-pass for it. I wrote a blog post about it once, trying to navigate the complexities of the issue. I coulda just waited a couple of years.
Yet leaving the humour and irony of that aside, when it comes to the veil, there’s an extreme cost, and no reward at all, for the young women in Iran who bravely challenge the authorities and remove the veil, citing it as a symbol of oppression. The “go girl” sisterhood doesn’t extend to those women who face death and imprisonment.
Yet in once sense I get this new obsession, even if, like all other obsessions with restless and rootless Westerners who are filled the neck with stuff, but who struggle to articulate why any of it matters, it will likely fade away. After all that’s how social contagions work.
Some social contagions are harmless (YoYo craze anyone?). Others are dangerous (Rapid Onset Gender Disphoria anyone?). And still others, like this one, are tapping into the vacuum in the West left by a generation of self-loathing, critical theory and the suspicion towards institutions that have held us up for so long. That’s what makes the contradictory nature of so much of this movement somewhat understandable.
You’d drive yourself mad trying to cobble together a pathway from sexually-fluid modern New Yorkers to hijab wearers on TikTok, but there is one. And it’s baked into the critical theory model that is, ironically, a right/wrong, oppressor/oppressed, Western/non-Western, binary/non-binary, divide. Everything has to be seen in that framework. Nuance is gone. Conversation to bring about synthesis from thesis and antithesis is so September 10 (or October 6 I guess)
Queers For Palestine
Which brings us to Queers for Palestine. That was a sign help up at several pro-Palestinian rallies. Yep, that’s right, the critical theory model of life, at least in the West, allows – indeed demands – that queer theory and queer people in particular are aligned with the Palestinian cause.
I want you to think about that. The only event that queers would have been welcomed at in a public way across the whole of the Middle East in the past few months would have been at the Nova music festival in Israel. You know that music festival where young people dressed like the young people you see at Bondi Beach on a Saturday night would have been. Yeah that one. The one that turned into a slaughter house as Hamas terrorists from Gaza invaded the place.
The only safe place to celebrate your queerness or your non-binary status in the whole Middle East is Israel. Yet here we are, with signs being held up “Queers for Palestine”. What I really thought was commendable was the manner in which many Palestinian protesters protested that! “No, no!”, they were saying “We don’t want your crazy Western ways. We are committed to Allah, and tradition and orthodox views about marriage.”
But there have been numerous articles showing how, actually, being Queer is the same as being a repressed Palestinian. If everything and everyone is either abuser/abused or oppressor/oppressed as Critical Theory demands, then of course it must be that, even if those Palestinians don’t get it, once they are as intellectually robust as we are, they will!
Of course such articles are written by well educated sensible Westerners who know what Palestinians think better than Palestinians do. That is, after all, the definition of intellectual imperialism; telling the great unwashed how we know better than they.
it’s a huge intellectual contortion to reach the Queers for Palestine stage, but let’s not pretend that Critical Theory is anything but a huge intellectual gymnastic exercise. The fact that Israel is the only country in a vast area that is democratic and free for queers to be, well, to be queer, isn’t the point.
The Jews are a result of Western colonialism and they you know, have a lot of money and stuff and way too much cultural clout for such a small cohort of people. Clearly, through a Critical Theory lens, they are the oppressor. And that, my friends, is how the crazy works.
Queers might be for Palestine, but Palestine is not for queers. If you want to see how sexually diverse people are treated across that part of the world, just Google it.
Yet the intellectual suicide of the West, and its corresponding patronising and intellectual colonising of other faith communities continues unabated. Even as the West itself falls apart intellectually and rejects the roots that gave birth to the sturdy oak that it has been for so many generations. And that’s what led to the contradictory and irreconcilable beliefs among young well-educated Westerners. And it’s what led to the gross antisemitism among them as well.
As I’ve written before, the intellectual giants such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, can see as plain as the noses on their faces, that the West owes its framework and its safety and its moral centre to the Judeo-Christian worldview. Any other worldview has never led to the freedoms that this worldview has. Yet the likes of Megan Rice enjoy its fruits, while spitting in its face.
And at a less intellectual level, my barber can see it too. He’s a young Muslim man who is hard working, funny and a bit of a reprobate. He swears hard, drinks hard, parties hard, does the woman thing hard (well the Western woman thing at least). Yet he knows that the West is in a death spiral. He is more than happy to enjoy its delicacies, but when it comes to living that way long term when he has to settle down? Well, ain’t nobody got time for that.
One day, when I was having my usual beard trim and banter, there was no one else in the shop. He was shaving my neck with a cut-throat razor with all the precision of a brain surgeon. And then he said this:
I like to go out and party and get with the girls, but when I marry, I marry someone like my mum. I marry a girl who wears the veil. Cos I don’t want no five year old girl of mine going to school in a crop top and a pair of hot pants.
It was hard to disagree with him, especially with a sharp blade against my neck!
Another Type of Veil
Yet that says so much about the West at the moment. The rest of the world isn’t looking on and going “Yeah we should be more like that!” The rest of the world is looking on at the West and seeing it like an Ibiza or Bali playground: a great place to have a good time, but with nothing much to offer other than pleasure for a season, before the serious work of life needs to begin.
So you can’t blame the Megan Rices, and others in the TikTok/Instagram world for their dewy-eyed, fawning over Islam. They’re looking for meaning and purpose in a world that is committed only to comfort and ease. As Rice said on her socials:
“It just seems that Palestinians have this ironclad faith even in the face of losing quite literally everything.”
And us? We can’t even go without two rolls of toilet paper before we start to panic about the end of the world and the Zombie Apocalypse. The West is soft and growing softer. Its brain has gone to mush. Not from outside influences, but from those inside who loathe the very framework that gave them a platform to espouse their hatred of it. It’s bizarre, and would be funny if it were not so frightening.
I literally thank God for the likes of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the likes of Tom Holland, and even Jordan Peterson, for being brave enough to point out that there’s a serious issue going on here, even if they don’t always land on the answers.
Now I’m just waiting for the Christian community to lean into its intellectual heritage and come up with something for us that’s deep, meaningful and more than the pietistic, quietest nonsense that so much evangelicalism in particular has succumbed to.
The Catholics do it far better in the public square. They’ve got a much more robust intellectual framework, particularly around anthropology and suffering. Maybe that’s why so many younger Christianised Westerners are turning to Catholicism and other “crunchy” versions of the faith.
After all, if a young Western woman is going to end up wearing a veil, I’d prefer it to be another type of head covering. One that is accompanied by a crucifix. For the story of the cross is our superpower. It’s the one thing that Islam does not have – a God who can identify with us in our suffering.
Jesus on the cross is the central image of the West, – the most reproduced image ever. It’s the one that birthed the whole framework that we take for granted today, and that we’re letting slide away in a mish-mash of identity politics and post-Christian self-loathing.
The cross after all, answers the foundational questions of suffering and evil, and offers an account of the good that will spring up despite it. It may not be trending right now, but surely the West is going to hit rock bottom soon, and look for answers that have always been available to it.
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