In January 2016, YouTube played host to a theological duel fit for the digital age. The topic of debate was whether it was appropriate for Muslims to celebrate Mawlid, the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad. (Though Muslims worldwide have celebrated the holiday for centuries — with feasts, processions, singing and even carnivals in some contexts — they increasingly find themselves on the defensive against Wahhabis, who view Mawlid as an impermissible innovation.) In lieu of swords, the opponents posted a number of video messages that volleyed off of one another, each bringing proofs from the extensive corpus of Islamic legal commentaries and rebutting the evidence offered by his opponent. In a register more reminiscent of the World Cup circuit than the highly formalized disputations of classical shari’a, their respective supporters continued the brawl in the comments field below. Things got so heated that another well-known YouTube personality, Ali Dawah, felt compelled to intervene and beseech fans to voice their positions in a more respectful manner.

In one corner of the ring stood Imam Muhammad Asim Hussain, the leader of Al Madina mosque in East London and founder of al-Hikam Institute, which offers religious education and community services in the city of Bradford, England. Though young (born 1990), and far more accessible in style than leaders of an older generation, Hussain is the also benefactor of a traditional Islamic education, having studied under Muhammad Imdad Hussain Pirzada and Qazi Hassan Raza, both renowned Pakistani scholars. Following the majority of Sunni jurists, Imam Hussain held that the celebration of Mawlid was permissible. It was indeed noteworthy that the Imam spent so much time (one video outlining his position surpasses three hours in length) justifying a practice that has been common for centuries, and that is particularly well-established in the Pakistani diaspora community of which he is a part.

In the other corner stood Imran Ibn Mansur, aka “Dawah Man,” also born in 1990, a former rapper turned Salafi YouTube evangelizer. Based in London, Ibn Mansur maintains a popular YouTube channel and operates an online educational platform called The Knowledge College (formerly, the Muslim Survival Guide) — all ostensibly devoted to helping “the average Muslim” become more pious. In particular, Dawah Man appeals to Western Muslims raised in a largely secular milieu, many of whom highlight their lack of any formal Islamic education (and backgrounds involving drinking, violence, and petty crime) before they were “guided” to the truth of their religion. In addition to maintaining a robust online presence, Dawah Man leads a number of public events in cities throughout England, which are then uploaded to his various media platforms. With regard to the Mawlid debate, Dawah Man echoed the Wahhabi position that the holiday is an unlawful innovation, or bida’, and recorded no fewer than nine videos disputing the proofs brought by Imam Hussain.

The Mawlid debate between Imam Hussain and Dawah Man encapsulates a number of tensions that run through contemporary Sunni Islam. On one hand, it was reminiscent of familiar controversies that have pit the customs of local communities against Wahhabi interpretations, which have spread throughout the world on the heels of a well-funded Saudi educational mission. Whether in Chechnya, Nigeria or Malaysia, in recent decades Wahhabis have emerged to argue that local forms of Islam are syncretic and therefore unlawful. Thus, Islam’s capacity to adapt to and absorb local conditions — undoubtedly one of the key factors that enabled its tremendous spread across the globe — has become its chief liability in the eyes of purists, who do not recognize that Salafi Islam is also a particular formation rather than the neutral carrier of uncorrupted religion.

Yet, and more significantly for our purposes, the video feud highlights a relationship between technology and religious authority, and indeed how changes in the former can serve to transform the latter. An early 20th Century Dawah Man certainly would not have been able to bypass traditional gatekeepers and speak directly to the masses at the scale enabled by the Internet. There are, of course, many precedents: from the printing presses that produced Martin Luther’s vernacular Bible to the local access channels that nurtured the Moral Majority; there is nothing static about the nature of religious authority. And while we often associate technological innovations with some form of democratization — as individuals gain the ability to access holy texts in an unmediated fashion, to do their own research, and to theoretically reach their own conclusions — this emancipatory narrative does not capture the complexity of these transformations.

Here, the case of Dawah Man is illustrative. In a type of double movement that is characteristic of many self-proclaimed religious guides, Ibn Mansur both attacks the authority of an establishment class and asserts his own — not despite his lack of credentials, but indeed because of it. What we see in such a move is not a true populist transfer of authority to the people at large, but the replacement of one class of authority figures (here, classically trained scholars, the ‘ulema) with another. What is the nature of this transformation, and what assumptions underpin the authority of the Everyday Man? A closer look at Dawah Man’s online presence reveals some possible answers.

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A self-proclaimed “street kid,” Ibn Mansur peppers his video sermons with English slang and Arabic terms in equal measure. As we will see, he never claims the title “imam” and often serves as a conduit for popularizing established Wahhabi positions. Though he is said to have studied at the Saudi-backed Al-Maghib Institute, he has no formal credentials to speak authoritatively about shari’a, though this hardly detracts from his popularity. On the contrary, his Everyman appeal is precisely why some Western Muslims — often lacking in formal religious education and growing up in countries where Islam is not intrinsic to various cultural and social forms — find him inspiring. And indeed, his videos communicate decisively about what Islam demands of the believer, meaning that for all intents and purposes, Dawah Man serves as an online sheikh for his flock of approximately 138,000 YouTube followers.

He often responds to queries from his viewers, and the types of questions he addresses have a decidedly modern bent. Dawah Man will let you know whether you may smoke weed (no), wear makeup (no), or vote in a Western democracy (no). He will advise “sisters” on thorny situations that they may find themselves in, such as what a woman should do if she needs to work in a haram environment. In this way, the structure of Dawah Man’s video channel mimics the question-and-answer format that has been central to Islam since the outset, when believers would bring questions to Prophet regarding everyday life. However, as the historian Richard Bulliet has argued, “what makes the question-and-answer motif distinctive in Islamic religious history is the variability over time of the parties deemed capable of answering questions authoritatively.”[1] While the first generation of Muslims looked to the Prophet’s companions and those in later centuries to sufi sheikhs or jurists, many now look to Dawah Man. He may not be an actual sheikh, but he plays one on YouTube.

Ibn Mansur exemplifies a populist mode of religiosity that bypasses traditional leaders, many of whom serve as his rhetorical punching bags. In contrast to the staid, scholastic language that has long been synonymous with religious authority, Dawah Man revels in railing against “Hijabi YouTubers” and directing Muslim women (who are interested in this-worldly pleasures) to “twerk to your husband in Paradise.” One video references an elderly man who has sex with a woman outside of marriage: “Old man, what you mean, you lived your whole life, you’re about to die. You’re supposed to be takin’ Viagra to get onto this. But, you out there sleeping with girls. You should be struggling to get it up but you out there sleeping with girls!” The language is casual and the banter affable: just a couple of Salafi bros hanging out teaching you how to avoid the hellfire.

Dawah Man is well-aware that he lacks the traditional credentials to speak authoritatively about Islam, but manages to spin this lack of expertise to his advantage. For instance, in the midst of his video feud with Imam Muhammad Asim Hussain regarding the permissibility of celebrating Mawlid, he shamed his adversary for using the incorrect form of an Arabic verb, and used this slip as an opportunity to speak to their relative qualifications:

“Wallahi it’s shocking that we’re going to take seriously — it’s shocking that even for a second we’re going to consider and take seriously an individual who is explaining to us his understanding of the ayah (verse) which no scholar of tafsir (Qur’anic exegesis) ever brought before… Yet he doesn’t even know the difference between a command verb and a present tense verb. And like I said, he’s an imam (with emphasis). You can pick mistakes out of individuals like myself, but we, we not claiming to be imams. We’re just your average street kids right? But, you’re an imam! You should not be making these mistakes.”[2]

This is but one instance in which Ibn Mansur references — and rhetorically undermines — Imam Hussain’s “expertise” vis-à-vis his own. In another message, he states, “You’re a man who’s an imam. Your people look at you as a scholar. You’re a man who studied the religion. That’s what everyone keeps saying — look, look, look, ‘Da’wah Man, who is he, who did he study under? What’s his senad[3], what’s his chain, who’s he studied under? [pause] imam, so-and-so, he is a man who studied under ‘ulema, studied Arabic, went here, traveled around the world, he’s a learned man, knowledgeable man’ — and you’re making some really basic mistakes.”[4]

If one strategy is to attack the expertise of the scholarly class, another technique is to appeal to the supposedly self-explanatory nature of religious truth. It is in letting the text “speak for itself” that Dawah Man, true to his Salafi proclivities, truly shines. Take for instance his video about the sinfulness of music, “which actually leads to the hellfire,” he argues, echoing a common Wahhabi position. At the outset of the video, he mentions the scholastic hand-wringing that characterizes the question as to whether music is permissible before changing courses entirely:

We always hear about this discussion about music. Is music haram, some will tell you ‘no,’ some will tell you ‘yes,’ if it is haram — then they will tell you what kind of music is haram, this type is permissible, What about instruments, can you use this instrument…what about this, what about that, can you have halal hip-hop, can you have halal music — all this discussion goes on, right? And we’re always quoting, ‘this sheikh said that sheikh said this person said that person said,’ so today, I thought to myself, ‘right, let’s just talk about what the Prophet said’.[5]

Within such a view, the Qur’an has already been understood and interpreted by the Prophet and his companions, and thus there is nothing else to do but act as a pure conduit for their practice. And while it is true that many of the sages of the classical age held that music was prohibited, medieval scholars disputed this view by pointing out numerous discrepancies — for example, that in Sura al-Isra’, the Qur’an mentions that David was given the Psalms — or by arguing that the prohibition was limited to the Prophet’s immediate context because of the historic association between music and idolatry. In practice, many traditions of music have flourished across the expansive geography of Islam, and music is regarded as permissible by a vast assortment of Sunni ‘ulema. Indeed, the prohibition against music is hardly a consensus position even within highly conservative or even fundamentalist contexts (ISIS videos, for instance, almost always include musical accompaniment, and legalizing concerts was among Muhammad bin Salman’s most high-profile reforms in Saudi Arabia).

The denial of any interpretive agency by Dawah Man, like others within the hermeneutic tradition of which he is a part, is integral to their discursive and material power. As I have argued elsewhere, the claim that the text can and should speak for itself is both a relatively novel position and an extremely consequential one when it comes to understanding contemporary Islamic movements. Beyond this though, I would like to suggest that what is most noteworthy about the form of authority that Dawah Man enacts is its faux-populism. On one hand, he attacks traditional elites and their scholastic practices (not to mention the “un-Islamic” customs that they support), speaking as nothing more than your average “street kid.” On the other hand, his entire media operation is clearly designed to carry viewers down an incredibly narrow interpretive path whose boundaries are fixed by Salafi positions. The point is not, then, to introduce young Muslims to the texts, interpretive traditions, or juridical principles that together constitute shari’a as a lived practice, such that they might become proficient enough to reach their own conclusions. The point is rather to convince them, through the use of selective texts, that the Salafi approach is the only permissible option. Thus, rather than dismantling religious authority by empowering individual believers, Dawah Man channels a false populism that is, in fact, authoritarian.

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In closing, it is worth noting some of the threads that link the Dawah Man phenomenon to the world beyond Salafi circles. Chief among them is the ambivalent role of online technologies in advancing individual agency vis-à-vis authoritative voices — be they of the established or “populist” nature. Contrary to libertarian fantasies, the vast amount of information at our fingertips is not an uncontested good that necessarily makes humans more free. Rather, digital life also enables new forms of control by leaders bent on usurping the power of traditional elites, and indeed, reconstituting that power on an increasingly authoritarian basis. That this is all done in the name of everyday people is not ironic — it is an essential part of the appeal. If this all sounds uncomfortably familiar in the days of

#fakenews, alternative facts, and a Tweeter-in-Chief, that is because Dawah Man belongs to a growing global phenomenon of right-wing populists who want to assure you that the world is both quite simple, and yet only they can truly understand it. Best get in line before the hellfire (or George Soros) gets you.

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[1] Richard Bulliet, Islam: The View from the Edge, 183.

[2] Naseeha Sessions, “The Ending of the Mawlid Debate,” available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT9pmgdEQsE, 12:20.

[3] A senad (plural: isnad) is a technical term used to denote the chain of transmission through which a hadith become known. In this contemporary context, it is used to indicate with whom one studied the religious sciences.

[4] Survival Sessions, Feb. 1, 2016. “You are Either a Liar Or You Are Ignorant!” Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbp2mRIL3YM&list=PLD_t6Hg9sq-8OMI53_bNq5P2CKHy3cuvp&index=5, 6:35

[5] Naseeha Sessions, “Music Lovers Become PIGS & MONKEYS.” June 9, 2018. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEj1hrhAYL8, 1:07.

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Suzanne Schneider is Deputy Director and Core Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. An interdisciplinary scholar working in the fields of history, religious studies, and political theory. Suzanne is interested in social and political life in the modern Middle East, in particular Jewish and Islamic modernism, religious education and jurisprudence, Palestine/Israel, and histories of violence. She is the author of Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine (Stanford University Press), and her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Forward, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Revealer: A Review of Religion and Media. She is currently working on a book about religion and violence in the modern age.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.