Islamizing the Red pill: Muslim masculinity and the Online Manosphere

In *The New Arab Man,* Marcia Inhorn, a prominent scholar of Muslim masculinities, challenges common stereotypes about contemporary Middle Eastern Muslim men. Inhorn’s work demonstrates that contemporary Middle Eastern Muslim men are moving beyond the patriarchal masculinity of their forefathers. Her work is significant, for it highlights the emergence of egalitarian Muslim masculinities in the Middle East. However, this paper seeks to draw attention to a starkly different form of Muslim masculinity emerging within the young Muslim diaspora of the West. This Red pill form of masculinity is far from egalitarian or feminist. Rather, it emphasizes a strict hierarchy where men must exercise authority over women to ensure social stability and to protect women from themselves. Methodologically, Red pill Muslim masculinity is also notably different from many of the traditional forms of Muslim masculinities historically practiced in the Middle East, South Asia, and Central Asia. Historically, Muslim scholars have drawn upon the Qur’an, the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, and local culture to craft nuanced notions of masculinity. Red pill Muslim masculinity, however, combines the teachings of popular youtubers such as Rollo Tomassi and Andrew Tate with a simplistic understanding of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. The outcome is a worldview where men and women are situated in a confrontational dynamic due to inherent and immutable evolutionary differences. For several popular Muslim youtube influencers, “taking the red pill” entails that Muslim men must view women as inferior, hypergamous, irrational, and solipsistic beings who all “subconsciously yearn to be dominated by emotionally unavailable, aggressive, and high status alpha men.”

It is important to note that the contrast between red pill Muslim masculinity and traditional Muslim masculinities is striking in several respects. First, as hinted above, red pill Muslim influencers espouse and disseminate a disturbingly disparaging and reductive view of womanhood. It is crucial to contrast this development with attitudes towards women in traditional Muslim thought. As Annemarie Schimmel, a prominent scholar of Islam has shown, even in the pre-modern era, when most Muslim thinkers espoused a patriarchal social structure, they simultaneously crafted inspirational portrayals of womanhood. Historically, prominent Muslim thinkers from Ibn Arabi to Rumi, have viewed women as symbols of resilience, trust, and wisdom. They encouraged men to understand women as spiritual equals and manifestations of divine mercy, who must be treated with compassion and respect. 

However, online Muslim red pill influencers who purport to explain "traditional Muslim masculinity" take a starkly different route. Consider the impact of “the Sunnah guy,” a popular influencer with nearly a million followers on instagram, who disseminated the misogynistic saying that “men age like wine, while women age like milk” among Muslims. Or consider the views of Mahdi Tidjani, an emerging Muslim youtuber who emphatically advises Muslim men to avoid marrying divorcees or single mothers. The irony is that both the Sunnah guy and Mahdi Tidjani purport to be offering traditional views of Muslim masculinity. The term “Sunnah” literally refers to the life and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. For centuries, Muslim thinkers across the world have celebrated the life of Khadijah, the first wife of the Prophet. She was fifteen years older than him and played a significant role in his spiritual mission, aiding him with her intelligence and empathy. Yet, far from drawing inspiration from the Prophet’s actual Sunnah where he found spiritual companionship with an older woman, the Sunnah guy dehumanizes women above the age of 25. In short, he follows the Sunnah of Rollo Tomassi rather than the Sunnah of historical Muslim precedents.  

Second, Red pill Muslim influencers espouse a reductively essentialist view of gender. This view relies upon a cursory understanding of evolutionary psychology. Historically, Muslim thinkers such as al-Ghazali have drawn attention to the complex relationship between gender, biology, culture, and subjectivity. Yet, for contemporary Muslim influencers such as Ali Dawah, Gabriel Romani, and most importantly, Andrew Tate (who recently converted to Islam), women across the world have uniform and immutable characteristics. Furthermore, women behave in predictable ways due to their evolutionary programming. Thus, for example, divorced women are incapable of pair-bonding with men due to sexual imprinting by their previous husband. Accordingly, from the red-pill perspective, the personal preferences or subjective experiences of divorced women are irrelevant. They will simply not be able to form a meaningful relationship with a new man on account of their inherent psychological incapacity to pair bond. It follows that young Muslim men must avoid marrying divorced women. 

From another red-pill perspective, women are inherently and constantly hypergamous, seeking men of a higher social status. From the Muslim red pill perspective, this means that even after marriage, Muslim husbands must constantly monitor the activities of their wives to ensure that they are not seduced by a man of higher status. Notions of love, trust, and loyalty do not have any meaningful role to play in the Muslim red-pill worldview. According to another red-pill take, women value male stoicism and they are repulsed by any show of male emotions and vulnerability. After all, from an evolutionary perspective, women can only be attracted to “strong men who show no weakness.” Since women have these universal psychological characteristics, men must cultivate contrasting traits to have successful relationships. Accordingly, Red-pilled Muslim masculinity requires the removal of soft masculine traits such as empathy, vulnerability, and affection. Rather, Muslim men ought to establish physical dominance, cultivate emotional unavailability, become judgmental, and exercise manipulative tactics to prevent their wives from exercising their “hypergamous instincts.” 

To summarize, Red pill Muslim influencers are cultivating an emergent form of Muslim masculinity in the West which is strikingly different from both feminist and traditional Muslim masculinities. As this paper will further show, they are reinterpreting principles and statements from premodern Islamic thinkers in the light of red pill ideology to reconstruct an ostensibly “traditional Muslim masculinity.” This, in my view, is the most alarming feature of this recent trend, for thousands of young religious Muslim men who are keen to be loyal to the tradition may walk away with such detrimental conceptions of masculinity. This red pill Muslim ideology not only lacks the complexity and nuance of traditional Muslim conceptions, but also refuses to acknowledge the tradition’s emphasis on compassion and empathy towards women, and themselves.