Like many others, I still choose to not be on TikTok.

Complete withdrawal from social media, however, carries its own costs, and unless one intends to become socially insulated, some degree of participation is almost unavoidable.

I therefore use WhatsApp, among other things, to remain in contact with family and friends… and, as anyone from South Asia knows, WhatsApp mostly means “forwarded messages.”

I received one such forwarded message not too long ago. It was a brief excerpt of a speech by a very well-known Pakistani religious scholar. I will leave him unnamed, though most South Asian Muslims would probably recognize him immediately.

The fact that it was an “excerpt” matters. In fact, it’s central to the point I would like to make.

The clip was about the necessity of “giving women their rights.”

Taken on its own, of course, there is nothing objectionable about this proposition. I would prefer to assume that the scholar did not devote an entire lecture to this isolated theme and that it was instead situated within a larger account of the reciprocal rights and duties of both women and men.

The problem begins precisely with taking just that one element from this larger moral architecture and circulating it as a self-contained message.

This brings us to what brother Daniel Haqiqatjou has repeatedly (and polemically) described through the figure of the “compassionate imam”: the religious authority who becomes so anxious to demonstrate Islam’s compatibility with the reigning (liberal-modernist) moral sensibilities of his audience that apologetics gradually determines which parts of the religion are emphasized, which are euphemized, and which are quietly made to disappear from the public view.

The mechanism is effective because its rhetoric is almost impossible to oppose at the level of sentiment. Who, after all, wants to be known as the man arguing “against women having their rights”? Who wants to appear cruel, oppressive, or “heartless”?

But this is precisely why sentiment is such a poor test of truth. After all, no successful ideology introduces itself by promising misery. Liberalism speaks of freedom. Socialism and communism speak of equality and emancipation. Nationalism speaks of solidarity and belonging.

Political vocabularies are populated by goods because human beings generally need to perceive a moral order as good before they can be persuaded to inhabit it.

The relevant question is therefore never simply if a proposition invokes compassion, freedom, dignity, equality, or rights. The question is what conceptual structure lies behind those words, what duties and institutions accompany them, and what competing goods are subordinated once one of them becomes absolute.

RELATED: Compassionate Imams and Crypto Reformists Blocked and Banned!

Gynocentrism

This is where the problem of gynocentrism enters the equation.

By gynocentrism I do not simply mean “concern for women,” less yet the recognition that “women possess rights.” A civilization can protect women without organizing its moral imagination around them.

Gynocentrism describes something more specific: a social order in which female preferences, welfare, autonomy, and subjective experience increasingly become the privileged criteria by which institutions are morally evaluated.

We have an obvious example in the contemporary West: family law, divorce, custody, reproductive politics, workplace policy, and the broader cultural treatment of marriage increasingly developed around the autonomous individual rather than the household as a durable corporate unit. Institutions are increasingly expected to justify themselves before the sovereign individual, and, in questions of sex and family, that individual is very often imagined as a woman seeking “liberation from inherited constraint.”

The smartphone revolution has radicalized this process because it has transformed the relationship between private preference and public culture: female agency is no longer exercised merely through family, neighbourhood, workplace, or local marriage markets. It is networked, quantified and exposed continuously to comparison. Courtship itself has been partially absorbed into enormous digital marketplaces.

This is why the extraordinary fall in fertility across much of the developed world – and increasingly outside of it too – has been linked to the “smartphone revolution” of the mid-2010s. All of this should at least make us suspicious of the naïve assumption that the technological maximization of individual choice leaves marriage, family formation, and relations between the sexes essentially unchanged.

RELATED: The Origins of the Incel Movement and Liberal Capitalism

Religion on or Through the Smartphone

Religious discourse inevitably encounters this new environment, and this is where the “compassionate imam” becomes sociologically interesting. He does not necessarily falsify doctrine outright (at least not in all cases). Many a time, what tends to occur instead is something much more subtle: selectivity.

Teachings that harmonize with the surrounding liberal-modernist moral atmosphere are amplified, while those that produce friction are contextualized, qualified, whispered… or simply omitted. Of course, it cannot be denied that it is also very common to encounter examples of outright distortion.

In this way, “the rights of wives over their husbands” becomes an endlessly renewable subject of sermons, clips, and social media posts. Meanwhile, the corresponding language of duties and authority becomes progressively more awkward to bring up.

Traditional gender norms are re-described until they resemble contemporary egalitarian expectations, while practices such as polygyny, although plainly present within the classical Islamic legal tradition, are treated as embarrassing historical residuals: technically impossible to deny but sufficiently uncomfortable that the safest strategy is often to not mention them at all.

Pay attention to what has transpired here. Religion has not formally been rejected. Instead, it has been subjected to a prior criterion of acceptability that is entirely liberal and secular in tone. The inherited tradition may remain authoritative but only insofar as its conclusions can survive the tribunal of contemporary female preference.

That is a much more consequential transformation than an explicit theological dispute, because it can occur while everyone involved continues insisting that nothing has changed: the texts remain the same; the vocabulary remains Islamic; the scholar remains a scholar… yet the hierarchy of emphasis has been reordered.

And in a tradition that is transmitted not just through books but also through sermons, habits, expectations, families, and institutions, what is systematically omitted eventually matters almost as much as what is formally denied.

This is also why I think the work of Callum G. Brown deserves much more attention here. I have written about Brown before (in 2022), but his argument is worth returning to because it complicates the familiar story of Western secularization.

In The Death of Christian Britain, Brown challenges the older account according to which Christianity simply declined under the cumulative pressure of industrialization, science, urbanization, and intellectual modernity.

His emphasis is instead on Christian Britain as a discursive culture: a civilization maintained through stories, identities, expectations, and ordinary moral scripts by which people, crucially including women, understood themselves as Christian subjects.

For Brown, the dramatic rupture comes remarkably late. British Christianity remained culturally resilient much longer than conventional secularization theory would lead us to expect.

Indeed, the decisive collapse occurs as late as the 1960s, when the Christian moral narrative that had structured everyday identity, especially ideals surrounding respectable femininity, marriage, sexuality, and domestic life, lost its capacity to reproduce itself.

Brown’s emphasis on gender is particularly important. Women had historically been disproportionately important to the reproduction of Christian culture: as churchgoers, mothers, moral educators, and custodians of domestic religiosity.

But precisely because Christianity had invested so much of its social reproduction in a particular construction of femininity, the transformation of female identity during the sexual and cultural revolutions of the 1960s had consequences far beyond just women themselves: once the older Christian script ceased to organize how large numbers of women understood sexuality, marriage, motherhood, and selfhood, one of the principal mechanisms by which Christianity reproduced itself from one generation to the next began to fail.

There is an irony here that contemporary Muslim discourse should take seriously: religious authorities may believe that “adapting religious presentation to contemporary female sensibilities” is necessary to prevent women from abandoning religion.

At the individual level, tact, compassion, and intelligent pastoral judgment are obviously necessary. At the civilizational level, however, there is another possibility: in continually modifying the presentation of a tradition so that it never seriously opposes the moral assumptions of the surrounding culture, one may preserve religious “identification” temporarily while hollowing out the very normative structure that made the religion distinctive.

The danger is not “compassion,” which is of course a noble virtue. The danger lies in taking compassion to an extreme and allowing it to become a hermeneutic or a lens through which you view the whole of reality, including morality and religion. Yet more problematic than this is female-centric supposed “compassion” that damages traditional Islamic teachings and codes even more.

The conclusion has already been smuggled into the premise once the operative question changes from “What does the tradition demand of men and women?” to “How can the tradition be presented so that contemporary women experience none of its demands as an unacceptable diminution of autonomy?”

The undeniable reality is that, once compassion exceeds its bounds, it does not remain “compassion” at all. It becomes something utterly rotten and ugly. This applies to pretty much everything in life. Take, for example, the matter of love. Love is of course a beautiful thing. Nobody would deny that. However, once love exceeds its bounds, it becomes obsession. The result is stalkers, groupies, people who can’t get their priorities right, and so on. The “compassion” presented by the “compassionate imams” is not actually compassion. It is a misguided delusion inspired by shaytan, who has deceived them into believing they know more of compassion than their Creator.

RELATED: Are Wives Responsible for Housework in Islam?

The “Divine Feminine”

I would like to to end with what, for lack of a more dignified expression, I would call the “cringe principle” of the “Eternal-Feminine.”

The phrase is from German writer Goethe’s das Ewig-Weibliche, the famous final movement of Faust II, “the Eternal-Feminine draws us upward.”

There is a certain irony here, since Goethe was also among the major European literary figures most unusually receptive to Islam, particularly to the Qur’an, Persian poetry, and the figure of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.

The Eternal-Feminine, in the sense I intend here, is what happens when the female ceases to be regarded simply as a human being – possessing virtues and vices, rights and duties, strengths and weaknesses – and becomes instead a metaphysical principle. In a way, this is gynocentrism raised from the social to the cosmological plane.

The woman is no longer just someone to be protected or accommodated. She becomes morally mystical, as her desires acquire an almost oracular quality. Her approval becomes evidence of justice, while her discomfort evidence that something has gone wrong.

In other words, one has effectively manufactured a “minor deity” while continuing to speak the language of human equality.

This is why the phenomenon is stranger than ordinary feminism. Political feminism can at least be argued against politically. For example, one can discuss laws, incentives, rights, obligations, empirical outcomes. The Eternal-Feminine operates at a deeper level. It turns femininity into a symbol of that which is innocent, authentic, natural, beautiful, and morally authoritative.

And once femininity has been metaphysically elevated, an entire constellation of associated concepts tends to rise with it. Consider the traditional symbolic polarity of “active and passive.”

Across very different philosophical traditions, masculinity and femininity have frequently been mapped onto broader pairs: active and receptive; form and matter; penetration and enclosure; transcendence and immanence; culture and nature; reason and feeling; severity and mercy; verticality and horizontality; order and fecundity.

The precise correspondences differ enormously between Aristotle, Neoplatonism, medieval Christianity, Taoism, Romanticism, and later esoteric traditions. They should thus not be collapsed into a single universal doctrine. Still, what matters for my argument here is the recurrence of the symbolic structure.

Now imagine what happens when one side of that structure ceases to be understood as complementary and instead becomes morally superior.

If femininity is sacralized, then receptivity itself acquires prestige over activity. To undergo becomes morally more pure than to impose, vulnerability more authentic than strength, feeling more authoritative than judgment, inclusion more virtuous than exclusion, etc. In other words, we have the modern left-liberal world which is encapsulated, even in a cliché way, through the so-called “social justice warriors” (SJWs).

As the passive principle becomes the moral principle, this has consequences far beyond just relations between men and women.

The first is the sacralization of Nature. Nature has historically been personified as feminine with remarkable persistence: Natura, Mother Earth, Mother Nature, the fertile soil, the womb, generation, fecundity. Romanticism intensified this association by contrasting living, organic Nature to the allegedly cold, masculine world of mechanism, calculation, and industrial domination.

Once the feminine is morally elevated, Nature can therefore cease to merely be a creation and become something nearing a moral subject. The older conception, in which nature is beautiful but also violent, fallen, dangerous, and something human beings must partly cultivate and master, is replaced by a sentimental opposition between innocent Nature and corrupting Civilization.

The language itself becomes gynocentric, as humanity “violates” nature while industry “rapes” the earth. This is not about “environmental care,” which any serious civilization requires. It is about the moral feminization of nature: nature imagined simultaneously as mother, victim, and judge.

The same inversion appears in the relation between feeling and reason, as feeling is immediate while argument is mediated. A civilization increasingly organized around therapeutic categories therefore tends to give subjective distress an epistemological privilege. “I feel unsafe” gradually goes from being a description of an internal state to a claim about external reality, where emotional injury becomes evidence of injustice, and discomfort becomes evidence against a norm.

Conventionally coded as feminine becomes culturally authoritative at precisely the moment when femininity itself becomes morally privileged: care instead of justice, empathy instead of judgement, etc. Again, these are all “respectable values” on their own, when they remain within their limits or bounds. At an interpersonal or individual level, however, mercy detached from justice becomes indulgence, while empathy detached from judgment becomes manipulation by whoever can display the greatest suffering.

In fewer words: gynocentrism makes the feminine principle the ultimate metaphysical and social decider.

I’ll end my short digression here, but readers should now understand why I say “cringe” when I mention the so-called Eternal-Feminine. It’s “simping” turned into practical metaphysics. It’s reversing all that is “objectively good” into what is “therapeutically better.” It’s catering to female and feminized sensibilities even if it means bringing a sort of end to the world as it has functioned over the centuries, as not just gender dynamics but the literal world itself is re-interpreted by elevating the “passive-receptive” aspect of existence.

RELATED: Early Muslim Encounters with Feminism: Women’s Education in the Late Ottoman Empire