بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
الحمد الله رب العالمين و صلى الله على سيدينا محمد و على آله و صحبه اجمعين
Allāhumma Ṣalli ʿAlā Sayyidinā Muhammad.
When observing the universe Allah created, we come to realize there is order. Since the universe changes, its arrangement is not fixed. The universe behaves according to certain patterns which we call “the laws of nature.” These laws allow us to observe and infer principles.
Allah designed each element in this ordered universe to serve a particular role and function, which, when accomplished, results in an arrangement that is orderly and balanced. However, when these functions are violated, like a pollutant mutating affected organisms, it is a betrayal of an element’s design leading to imbalance and thus, disorder.
The same is the case for our spiritual and social life (ʿibādāt wa’l–muʿamalāt). Allah has given us the Sacred Law, so that we can arrange our spiritual, personal, and social lives into a form that pleases Him.
He has designed us to play particular roles and has given us our Sacred Law that confirms and informs us of these roles. By trying to rewrite or abandon the roles we were given, we introduce a state of disorder into the system. This distortion is satanic.
It cannot be doubted that, today, we are witnessing many deep social crises throughout the world. This is true both in the traditional Muslim lands, as well as in the Western world. Many Muslims, and especially Muslim leaders, are complicit in these crises. Many have abandoned the roles that they were designed and commanded by Allah to maintain.
Many have abandoned the functions that they were designed and commanded by Allah to serve. And many have abandoned these roles, either by distorting the Sacred Law and observations of the world to suit their nafsanic imperatives or by their outright rejection.
Imagine you hire a doctor to be your company’s accountant, but he knows nothing about accountancy. His function is that of a doctor but his role is that of an accountant. This fundamental mismatch between functions and roles will mean that your company’s finances will be in ruins.
Consider a woman trying to play the role of a father to a son. The resulting imbalances due to a lack of capacity will result in even greater disorder. When there is a mismatch between one’s capacity, function, and role, something’s got to give.
As varied as modernity’s crises are, we are concerned here with only one core perversion: the distortion of gendered roles.
Allah created men and women with particular and unique capacities. Allah gave different rights and responsibilities to each, in accordance with their design and specific functions. Stated another way: in the Islamic Ethos, each gender’s role in society is Divinely Prescribed.
We know this by means of the proper sources and order of knowledge our Sacred Law rests upon: textual, observational, and inferential bases. Further, how we interact with each source of knowledge must follow a particular order.
For example, we begin from and affirm first principles like what is known by necessity. Also, there are specific religious proof texts (nuṣūṣ) that bear this out, in addition to which we have a long standing legal tradition that enshrine these roles, with certain details differing across the various madhāhib.
In essence, we are making a moral case here: a woman’s primary role ought to be that of a caregiver to her family. Likewise, a man’s primary role ought to be that of a steward over his family’s well being, and who necessarily wields authority over them to ensure that well being.
Each gender has a specific reproductive biology, neurology, endocrinology, and therefore, psychology. Thus each gender is primarily suited to a range of specific bio-psycho-social functions. Despite any areas of convergence in our capacities, there are wide ranges of divergence.
No man can bear children. No woman can impregnate another woman. The average woman is better at providing primary infant care than the average man. The average man is better at disciplining children than the average woman. The average man is more fit to hunt down a caribou than the average woman.
Therefore, our gender roles are congruent with our functional capacities and design. This is by Allah’s Wisdom, Mercy, Justice, and finely Fashioning all of creation. Unfortunately, however, today many are shaped to minimize these roles (at least) or outright reverse them (at worst).
How did we get here?
Consider the following examples and assess for yourself if they resonate with you. Chances are that you have most likely come across them online.
- Compassion towards advocates for LGBTQ+ while harshness towards men and women in favour of polygamy.
- Disregarding a husband’s pleasure while enabling exhibitionist women who adorn themselves publicly (tabbarruj).
- Shaming signs of a healthy natural disposition (fiṭrah) such as protective jealousy over one’s womenfolk (ghayrah).
- Glorifying service to outsiders like employers while demonizing service to husbands and the family.
- Praising males who defer to the women’s carnal selves (nufūs) while demonizing men who enjoin good and forbid evil.
- Encouraging women to pursue careers while shaming those who wish to prioritize homemaking and raising a family.
- Enabling illicit sex (zinā’) while disincentivizing matrimony (nikāḥ).
- Complaining about the lack of “good men” to marry, but ignoring honest examination of skyrocketing rates of female-initiated divorce.
- Fostering a culture of materialistic deprivation of the other’s assets on divorce while selling narratives of “strong independent women” versus “dead-beat dads”.
- Selling a narrative of female mental health issues blamed on the patriarchy, while ignoring the link between higher rates of male-suicide, and female anxiety and depression in a post-feminist world.
- Painting even and measured assertiveness in men as evil while glorifying domineering women.
- Shaming traditional male preferences while mandating compliance with progressive-female preferences.
- Mismatched expectations between men and women in marriages.
- Encouraging young men and women to delay marriage.
- The public shaming of school-going boys.
- Force-fitting boys into classrooms and teaching styles attuned to girls.
You get the picture.
These examples represent nothing less than a sustained attempt at the disruption or outright inversion of gender roles through an active program of social conditioning. Such programming seeks nothing less than the active eradication of our fiṭrī inclinations and the moral, legal, and social order that enables their fulfillment in line with the pleasure of Allah.
What has been the consequence of this social programming?
In the West, a boy is fortunate if he has a father-figure at home. And he’s the social equivalent of a millionaire if his father-figure embodies masculinity by discharging his responsibilities towards his family and wielding functional authority over them to ensure their well being. Many boys in the West, however, are not so blessed.
Consequently, the boys that lose out are instead fed a steady diet of simulation and simulacra: a risk-free hero’s journey in a Netflix binge, anonymous male companionship in an online first-person shooter, and rejection-free sexual experiences with an army of women through online pornography. What they lose out on is nutrition, mental acuity, spiritual growth, and meaning intimacy.
In this climate of both physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual malnourishment, boys and men are suffering largely in silence. They are directionless and desperate for answers to fundamental existential questions.
But, Western society largely ignores their issues. If those issues are ever acknowledged, they’re only acknowledged to demonize and shame them. Their attention is currency and they are being robbed blind.
To make matters worse, unlike traditional and communitarian societies of old, there are rarely any networks of mature men who embody masculinity that can guide these lost boys into manhood. Instead, all too many are not only disconnected from this tragic reality, but are eager to join in on their collective shaming, while, at the same time, excusing the degeneracy of women.
These boys are left to spiral aimlessly out of control, at the mercy of others’ reactions until they hit a boiling point and self-destruct.
This actual and effective removal of the father-figure from the lives of young boys is not only the unfortunate result of the decades-long process of social programming that sought to reverse the roles of men and women.
It has also created a vicious circle, in which each succeeding generation has even fewer examples of masculinity than the preceding generation. As a result, every succeeding generation will be “less masculine,” as it were, than what “ideal masculinity” requires of him.
The responses to this “crisis of masculinity,” both, from the West as well as the Muslim world have been dysmal.
On the Western front, frustrated young men in the late 90s began to respond to this inversion. Their frustration was the result of a decades-long erosion of traditional norms that allowed young men and women to get married without the pressure of having to go out and look for spouses themselves. Families were invested in the success of their children – they vetted potential spouses and acted as advocates for the merits of their children.
This was further exacerbated by the spread of the mythical idea of complete equality between the sexes. This led such men to believe that merely reasoning with women on why they should marry these men would result in marriage (and therefore, sex).
When that didn’t work, their frustration led them down the path to developing “Pick Up Artistry,” a set of practices allowing them to manipulate women into sleeping with them. Unbeknownst to them at the time, this frustration would lead to the development of multiple strains of thought collectively known as the “manosphere.”
Today, the “manosphere” hosts under its umbrella ideas ranging from an analytical/evolutionary understanding of female behavior (the Red Pill) all the way down to a complete disconnection from women because “it’s not worth it” (the Black Pill/MGTOW) with Men’s Rights Activism (a strain of thought highlighting the erosion of the voice of men in family/divorce courts) falling somewhere in the middle.
Needless to say, a space created as a result of sexual frustration can only lead to insincere hustlers peddling snake oil as a solution to their sexual problems. And even among the few voices in this space that are genuine, none truly has a principled solution to the crisis.
Merely learning a few techniques, or possessing an analytical understanding of the nature of inter-gender relations, or wailing endlessly about how men are being treated unfairly by the courts or, indeed “going your own way” are not thorough and comprehensive solutions.
Many Muslim communities suffer as well. Popular speakers neither grounded in orthodoxy nor knowledgeable about the practical realities of gender interaction often provide advice without true knowledge that ends up trickling-down into the popular discourse.
Muslims are often told to “just follow the Qur’an and Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ.” We accept that it is imperative that we follow the Qur’an and Sunnah (the Prophetic ﷺ example), however when popular speakers without intellectual grounding say the statement above, what they often intend is their concept of ‘following’ which entails a rejection of scholarly legal methodologies (uṣūl) and codified schools (madhāhib) while accepting latter-day splinter groups. In truth, they want a re-examination of those sources on their own terms.
Even among those who profess to embody the centuries old legal traditions of fiqh (especially here in the West) as “spokesmen for Islam in the west”, what is lacking is the moral embodiment of the whole tradition.
Either, they can’t apply the principles of religious masculinity in the contexts that it needs to be applied in (which is merely a matter of a lack of competence on their part), or they deliberately attempt to rewrite or bend the abundantly clear gendered imperatives in Muslim orthodoxy to defer to their female fan-base by using – an approach that is ultimately steeped in the liberal-progressive narrative.
This is even more devious than those whose hermeneutic is explicitly feminist and rejects traditional scholarship in stating that it is “misogynistic and patriarchal.” They also consist of movements that seek to back-project progressive ideals onto Islamic history, while mischaracterizing, misinterpreting, or cherry-picking their way through texts.
Ironically, all of these distortions run counter to their claim of (only) following “the Qur’an and Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ.” Thus, it is irresponsible to expect that without the proper tools and methodologies the boys and men among today’s laity can independently extract rulings pertaining to gender imperatives.
A step above this is to encourage boys and men to read the works of futuwwah (chivalrous virtue), the literature that pertains specifically to sexuality between the spouses, or the general ḥadīth works that pertain to virtuous character and practical morality (akhlāq and adāb). However, many lack the requisite skills to infer a holistic theory of masculinity that can actually contend with modern concerns from these works.
What we need is a new approach that is both modern and rooted in the sciences (ʿulūm) of the Sharīʿah. We need an approach that is not only rooted in our religious tradition, but also draws from various modern disciplines, e.g. biology, psychology, neuroscience, counselling, etc.
What we need, above all, is a theory of masculinity that is not only based on practical techniques (drawn from the various modern disciplines), but is also founded upon the broad principles of Islam.
And so we come full circle. We are right where we began. With function and with order. We need to reconnect men to their masculine functions, so that men can learn how to order and arrange the world around them; so that they can learn to order and arrange their relationships, especially the relationships with their parents, siblings, wives, and children, before anybody else.
Without the masculine function, it is nearly impossible to elicit the proper feminine function. And without both operating in tandem it is nearly impossible for a new social order to emerge that can correct the excesses of the past.
The masculine function is that of responsibility coupled with the authority that enables this responsibility to be enacted. And so, it should be our aim, through the teaching of theory and the application of technique to impart back to modern Muslim men their masculine function; to lead them through the various stages of tarbiyyah that will allow them to competently steward their relationships in the modern world.
