A “Crisis of Masculinity”?: The West’s Cultural Wars in the Emerging Muslim Manosphere

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/reorient.7.2.0135
• Published date: 14 December 2022
• Date: 14 December 2022
• Pages: 135-157
• Author: Sahar Ghumkhor,Hizer Mir
• Subject Matter: alt-right,White Shariah,masculinity,Muslim manosphere,culture wars

ReOrient 7.2 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

University of Melbourne: ghumkhor@unimelb.edu.au

University of Leeds: h.mir@leeds.ac.uk

A “CRISIS OF MASCULINITY”?: THE WEST’S

CULTURAL WARS IN THE EMERGING MUSLIM

MANOSPHERE

Sahar Ghumkhor and Hizer Mir

Abstract: This article aims to frame the emergence of a new category of thought, referred

to here as “Alt-Wallah”, within the Islamicate which exists at the intersection between

a supposed crisis of masculinity, the Alt Right, and Muslim men. This framing begins by

looking at the various crises that abound both in Islam and in masculinity. We then intro-

duce what Farris calls “femonationalism”, and give some reflections on the relationship

between our new category of thought and this femonationalism. This new category of

thought is given the name “Alt-Wallah”, and then linked to certain already existing cat-

egories of thought within the Islamicate. Other names are considered throughout the

piece, as well as reasons as to why these are not adequate to describe the phenomenon in

question. This is followed by an analysis of examples such as online Muslim figures Daniel

Haqiqatjou, Nabeel Aziz, and others, as well as an exploration of further similarities to

what is called the “fundamentalist declinist” category of thought. We then conclude with

a reflection on the buffered Muslim man, and on what role the idea of the mujtahid plays

in this conceptualisation of Muslim man.

Keywords: alt-right, White Shariah, masculinity, Muslim manosphere, culture wars

Introduction

In July 2021, a video posted by Muslim Positive Psychology counsellor Gabriel

Keresztes Al-Romaani provoked heated debate among Muslims on social media.

In this video, a visibly upset Al-Romaani responds to globally renowned Mufti

Menk, a Muslim cleric who shared a video of demonstrating his knitting skills – a

skill that he had learnt as a child and which he hoped to pass on to his children.

Al-Romaani’s video, titled “Killing Muslim Masculinity Mufti Menk”, begins

with the question “is this masculinity?” (Al-Romaani 2021); it then proceeds to

accuse Mufti Menk of displaying feminine behaviour when he should instead be

modelling masculinity by teaching hunting, swimming, riding a horse, archery,

DOI:10.13169/reorient.7.2.0135

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boxing, and other such activities which Al-Romaani insists are more in line with

Sunnah manhood. Feminine activities by men, he charges, contribute to low tes-

tosterone and low libido, which lead to diminished manhood, making the men in

question unattractive to women.1

This conception of a masculinity in decline and in need of intervention is symp-

tomatic of a prevailing belief in some online communities of Muslim men. These

groups see an impending “crisis of masculinity” in what this article maps as an

emerging Muslim manosphere. This “manosphere” is a term we borrow in refer-

ence to the wider phenomenon of growing communities of men online (Marwick

and Caplan 2018) who are focused on a range of concerns, but often centred on the

defence of traditional masculinity. The Muslim manosphere is an online Muslim

community of men who are highly mobilised, engaged, frustrated, and sometimes

even angry, carving out their own space in the West’s “culture wars” where debates

about gender, race, multiculturalism, and religion have been cast as crises under

neoliberal capitalism. The article maps out the Muslim manosphere as a com-

plex political configuration of seemingly competing ideological forces by tracing

where they converge and diverge with wider trends. It begins by examining the

first convergence of a “crisis of masculinity” and how it is a precipitating factor in

the resurgence of the alt-right, whose opposition to immigration, and particularly

Islam, frames such stances as in defence of Western civilisation.

The political mood of this “crisis”, which has allowed some to guard conven-

tional masculinity and Western secular /liberal values in the shadow of the Muslim

question, has morphed into a curious alliance between liberals, feminists, neolib-

erals, and the far right – one that Sara Farris (2017) calls femonationalism. As

a front of the culture wars, femonationalists share a belief in a “crisis of Islam”

qua the woman question as part of their preoccupation with the status of Muslim

women in Islam. Such convergence raises an urgent question: how do we explain

femonationalism in the shadow of a “crisis of masculinity” which itself identi-

fies feminism as the key, looming social ailment? Femonationalism is not only a

civilisational defence of Western values, but its capacity to mobilise Islamophobia

– the treatment of Muslims as a problem – also repurposes and preserves Western

“heroic masculinity” as an ideal guardian of the nation’s boundaries. The nation’s

values are in consequence imagined to be defended by protecting Muslim women

from the “toxic masculinity” of Muslim men.

At the same time, a Muslim manosphere is forming which has been called

a host of names such as “akhi- right”, “akh-right”, the “Muslim alt-right”, the

“green pill movement”. Identifying an ideological phenomenon in which the cul-

tural wars have centred on Muslims, and quite often picking at issues surrounding

gender and race, these Muslim men mobilise around a growing sentiment they

share with the alt-right about a “crisis of masculinity” and the threat of “the radical