The Dark Side of Modern Feminism

Why Do We Follow Influencers?

Many people wonder, why is Andrew Tate the most followed man in the world? But let's ask a deeper question. Why do we follow any influencer? Why do these people become famous? Why do we obsess over them? Why do we follow their ideas? Why do we watch their clips? And I take you back to a hadith of the Prophet ﷺ. He said:

As you are, so will your leaders be over you. (Musnad Ahmad / Al-Bayhaqi, Shu'ab al-Iman)

And the same hadith can be applied to influencers today. The influencer, whoever it is, is just a mirror for who we are.

Who can tell me — if we just say Andrew Tate is an example, but there are so many others — what do these male, masculine influencers, what are they advertising about their life? Wealth? Status? Fast cars? Just be honest — women.

They show this lifestyle where they can get whatever they want. Fast cars, women, wealth, status. Nobody can stand up to them — they're the boss. They show you the way they walk from six angles. They flex. The whole thing is a flex, from the biceps, to the wealth, to the status.

The Hole Inside You

But why are they doing that? Why do you find yourself scrolling? Why do you find yourself watching the video again and again? Why do you find yourself listening to them? Because they have tapped into something inside you — something missing inside you. There is a gap inside you. There is a hole inside you. And they are pouring their juice into that hole.

You feel deep down like you're not a real man — they will tell you what a real man is. You feel deep down like you don't have enough wealth — they will tell you how to get rich quick in 10 days. You feel deep down like you're not successful with women — they will teach you how to seduce a woman. What you lack, they will feed. And the only reason such people are famous is because there are so many of us that are hungry for what they have.

The influencers are just a reflection of who we are. It's like a restaurant. If a restaurant doesn't sell any food for 30 days, can it stay open? What keeps the restaurant open? Not the food — customers. The more you eat, the more branches will open up.

Which restaurant has the highest number of branches in this country? McDonald's, KFC? Why are there so many branches of McDonald's in this country? What gave them the ability to expand so quickly? It's us. We fed them. We paid their bills. We gave their CEO a raise. We are the ones who are feeding them so they can expand and populate and grow.

We are the ones who fed the influencers. We are the ones who fed McDonald's. We gave them the gap, the hole, the hungry belly. And they just gave us what we were looking for. Simple as that.

The First Principle: Influencers Only Give You What You Want

When we look at these influencers — whether they're feminists, whether they're meninists, whether they're everything in between — just remember one thing: the only reason they exist is because we are feeding them. And they are feeding us what we want to hear. They will only tell us what we want to hear.

So you have a whole generation of young men who feel as though men have lost their power — since the time the dishwasher was manufactured, since the time women could vote. Men have now become oppressed, so we have to fight back. You're thinking this in your head. Now you find somebody saying it to you — yeah, I want to listen to him. He's telling me what I'm already thinking. I want more. I want the fast cars. I want the luxury. And now he's the most famous man on earth.

It's the same on the other side. That's the first principle you have to remember about the age of influencers: they will only give you what you want. The fact that they are famous is because there's something inside you that desires them.

The Second Principle: Extremes Create Extremes

For a number of years, for a number of decades, the feminist movement succeeded in convincing women that they were oppressed. That men were oppressive. That they needed to take over. They needed to control their man. They needed to tell the man what to do. Enough of being told and pushed around and making sandwiches in the kitchen — it's time to fight back.

And after this propaganda was propagated throughout society, what happened? The other extreme began. "Oh, women are in power. Women are oppressing men. We need to fight back. We need to flex. We need to go to the gym. We need to lift weights. We need to be the powerful." And what happened after that? The other extreme fights back. Extremes create extremes.

Your Device Owns Your Brain

But how do we end up following these people? How do we end up falling into this zone? We don't realize we are drinking these ideas as we sleep and as we wake. It's because we look at our devices as though we need them. But what you need to realize is: this device is making money from you. It needs you to keep scrolling. It will keep showing you the things that you want to see — more and more of it. You watch one video, it will suggest you six more of the same category. Every second your eyeballs are on the screen, money is being made somewhere. You have become a victim. You have become a consumer. Your brain is owned. This is what has come of us in this age.

What the Qur'an Teaches Us

What does the Qur'an teach us? The Qur'an teaches us — in the verses recited in the beginning of this session — there will come a day in which the influencers will say, "I have nothing to do with all those people and what they did." The influencers will say, "I've got nothing to do with these guys." And they're saying this while looking at the punishment awaiting them. The path between you and this influencer will be cut.

The followers — and that's you and me, the followers — will say: "If we just had one more chance to go back to the life in this world, we would have unfollowed them, just like today they pretended they didn't know us." On the Day of Judgment, most of us — or all of us — will hope and wish Allah sends us back to this world so we can log into our social media accounts and unfollow every single one of those influencers. We will hope that Allah sends us back, but it'll be too late — because we have developed the follower's mindset. We have developed the mind in which we are always ready to drink what somebody is giving us to drink, to eat what they give us to eat. We are consuming the ideas. We are happy to keep consuming.

Do Not Be a Blind Follower

The Prophet ﷺ in what is reported in Sunan al-Tirmidhi teaches us a very, very important point: do not become blind followers — doing as you see people do, saying as you see people say, following blindly without thinking.

What's the filter you should apply? When you see something — an idea, a video — you should apply a certain filter. And it's not an Instagram filter. Every idea you come across, whether it's a feminist idea or a meninist idea, whether it's telling you that your woman should be doing X or your man should be doing X, whether it's telling you the red pill or the white pill or the pink pill — it doesn't matter. Every idea: a believer looks at these ideas and thinks, "Hold on a second, should I accept this?" And there is a certain thing you are comparing it against. You are asking: is it true? Is it not true? You are comparing it against the Revelation.

Revelation — the Qur'an — that is the pure water that we drink from. Somebody comes by and says, "Look, I'm selling you some rose syrup, let me put that in your water." You say, "Hold on, I don't know if it agrees with my water or not." Somebody else comes to you — "Look, I'm selling a special type of tea." You say, "Hold on, my friend. I don't know whether that's going to dissolve in my water. I want to drink from the pure." The Qur'an and the Sunnah are pure. They came with no pollution, no contamination. That's what we should be drinking from.

Why Was the Qur'an Revealed to the Arabs?

Now you tell me — why, of all the people in the world, why did Allah — He could have revealed the Qur'an to the Chinese in Mandarin, He could have revealed it to the Japanese in Japanese, He could have revealed it to the Pakistanis in Urdu — why did He reveal it in Arabic to the illiterate people who did not know how to read or write?

The Arabs were desert dwellers. They had no literature, no ideology. They were an empty, blank piece of paper — write what you want. The Romans, the Chinese, every other civilization, every other people — they had their own culture, their own literature, their own religion, their own ideologies. They were full cups. There was no space for the Qur'an. But the Arabs were ummiyyūn — they were empty. They did not mix anything with the Qur'an. They took it as it came. Simple people.

The Guantanamo School of Tafsir

The problem we find with all of these modern ideas about gender — gender roles, what should a man be like, what should a woman be like — is that people form the idea first, then they come to the Qur'an and try to find the āyah that confirms what they're saying. This is called the Guantanamo School of Tafsir — you have to strangle the text until it tells you what you want to hear. They come to the Qur'an with a certain idea in mind and try to find the āyah that agrees.

"The Qur'an is a feminist Qur'an." "The Qur'an is a meninist Qur'an." "The Qur'an is a liberal Qur'an." No. The Qur'an is none of those things. The Qur'an is unique. It is Revelation from Allah, the Most High. It does not follow any agenda and any influencer. It came with its own message, independent.

When we get any idea, any message, any ideology, any philosophy from anybody on the internet, we have to compare it with the Qur'an. As Allah says — it is not becoming of a believer, male or female, that if Allah decides something, you have no choice in that matter.

This idea of muhākamah — judging things by the Qur'an, taking all ideas to the court of the Qur'an and seeing how does Allah judge — Allah is the judge between all ideas and opinions on this earth. Allah will judge all of these ideas and opinions on the Day of Judgment, in which they were different.

A Shocking Reality

The strangest occurrence in my life so far is the day I got a call from somebody from Leeds who told me that his brother gave his wife a divorce after watching an Andrew Tate video. Because after watching the video, he concluded that his wife was not the right kind of woman because she doesn't follow his commandments. So he went and issued the divorce to her: "Get out of the house."

The next day I got another call — somebody from Huddersfield. What happened? He told his wife to leave the house. Why? Because he had been following Andrew Tate for a while and he realized that he was being a "yes man," so he needs to be a "no man" from today.

Is this what's happening? Is this really what's happening? I couldn't believe my ears. Is this a fairy tale? Is this a story? Am I living some kind of virtual simulation? No — this is reality. We don't realize how much we become influenced by the influencers. We have become followers.

The Only One Worth Following

But Allah did not create a believer to be a follower of anybody else except the Prophet ﷺ. This is why Allah says in the Qur'an:

"O Muhammad, tell them: if you love Allah, then follow the Messenger." You know what that means? It means unfollow everyone on the face of this earth except that Messenger.

We have to stop being blind followers. We have to watch what we eat. Watch what we consume. Watch what we see. Watch the ideas that are being planted in our minds and in the minds of our children — because we have heard the wrong idea and acted on it.

If we don't attach ourselves to the meanings and the teachings of the Qur'an, if we don't make Allah the judge between all opinions, we too will fall prey. We too will fall prey and we will be victims to the influences of the modern day.

Don't be influenced by anyone except Allah and His Messenger — and use that to influence everybody else in the world.