Earlier this month, I was told I had become too emasculated to get married.
Over a grainy Facebook Live feed, a bearded man draped in white robes shouted: “There is a problem with Muslim men today!” He continued: “They complain that they can’t get married to good Muslim women, but they have allowed the women… to be corrupted by Western ideals, and, as a result, belittle them as men.”
The 30-something man, who goes by the pseudonym Abu Muawiyah, gives this type of marriage workshop semi-frequently via Facebook. He lives in a small town in the north of England and livestreams from his living room, sporting a white thoba (a type of Islamic robe) and an unkempt beard. It’s the first time I’ve seen his face (his profile picture is simply a picture of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem), and his profile says little about him, other than “liking” pages for dawah (Islamic proselytizing) and Assassin’s Creed.
Abu Muawiyah says he wants to help young Muslim men living in the West get married because he feels most mosques in the U.K. have failed at that. “Most imams know nothing about relationships,” he complains, and have mainly “given advice for outdated arranged marriages.” It’s an issue that many Muslim men wanting to pursue relationships in an “Islamically permissible” way will attest to. Still, Abu Muawiyah’s workshops are fairly small — during this session, only 20 people tuned in, dropping to around five by the end of the session. He’s not particularly well known in the mainstream British Muslim scene — except by the community of Muslim men with a broader interest in “men’s rights,” who connect largely through private Facebook groups.
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https://melmagazine.com/the-small-growing-world-of-muslim-mras-cf4a0bccba0eOld article, but hasn't been shared here before...