You may have come across some of the recent controversy surrounding a TikTok creator known as “Ayah’s Voice.” She has become the subject of intense conversation on various social media platforms including X.

I do not use TikTok myself, but from what I’ve seen circulating online, she appears to command a somewhat substantial audience, likely in the low hundreds of thousands. Of course, it’s more than likely that a significant portion of those that view her content don’t agree with her at all and actually only watch her videos to hear what utterly idiotic thing she’ll say next. In fact, a lot of her content seems to be obvious clickbait and rage bait material, designed to game the algorithm by playing on the sensibilities of faithful Muslims. Many have suggested that she has possibly left Islam and only pretends to still be Muslim for the sake of engagement farming. Others have highlighted how many of the things she says are outright kufr (disbelief) and not compatible with Islam. It is also very possible that many, if not even most, of the comments supporting her trash takes are just bots and sinister individuals pretending to be Muslims, in order to artificially boost her account and content and to make it appear as though there are actually people out there who are so completely deluded that they agree with the things she says.

More important than the issue of viewership, she has become emblematic of a broader tendency among some very confused self-identified Muslim women who have adopted (crypto-)feminist assumptions, framing “Muslim men” as a homogeneous adversarial class and extending this antagonism even to the ‘ulama’, the inheritors of the Prophetic legacy who devoted their lives to studying the Revelation, preserving the Sunnah, and transmitting the sacred sciences of Islam.

May Allah reward them abundantly, and may peace and blessings be upon the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.

Yet, to reduce this phenomenon to feminism alone would be intellectually insufficient. Feminism is undoubtedly a significant factor, indeed, perhaps the most immediately visible one, but it is better understood as a symptom of a far deeper civilizational paradigm rather than its ultimate cause.

The rhetoric displayed in such cases is the product of an entire constellation of modern assumptions that have progressively reshaped how individuals conceive of authority, identity, truth, and the self.

In other words, what is at stake is not merely feminism but modernity itself.

The Individual, the Self

The first and perhaps most fundamental element of this modern worldview is individualism, which is itself inseparable from the liberal philosophical tradition.

Classical liberalism progressively detached the individual from the moral, religious, and communal structures that had historically constituted human identity. Beginning with thinkers such as Hobbes and, more decisively, Locke, the individual came to be understood as a self-owning agent whose rights precede communal obligations.

Locke’s conception of property famously begins with the proposition that every man possesses “property in his own person,” a principle that later theorists, particularly C. B. Macpherson, described as possessive individualism, i.e., the idea that the individual fundamentally owns himself and owes nothing intrinsically to any higher social or metaphysical order.

This trajectory would later culminate in J. S. Mill’s celebration of individual autonomy and, in contemporary philosophy, what Charles Taylor has termed the modern ideal of “expressive individualism,” whereby authenticity is achieved through the public expression of one’s inner identity rather than through conformity to transcendent norms.

Within such a framework, religious authority inevitably becomes suspect: the more one distinguishes oneself from inherited traditions, established scholarship, and communal expectations, the more one appears to embody “authenticity” and “independence.”

Consequently, for individuals shaped (often unconsciously) by these assumptions, contradiction itself acquires symbolic value.

Opposition to religious norms is no longer simply disagreement. It becomes an act of self-construction.

The transgression of inherited moral boundaries is experienced as emancipation, while deference to scholarly authority is recast as intellectual servitude.

It is precisely within this liberal anthropology that contemporary Muslim feminism finds fertile ground. Feminism does not emerge here as an isolated ideology but as one expression of a broader modern impulse: the elevation of autonomous subjectivity over divinely revealed authority.

Thus, figures such as this Ayah are not merely advocating particular feminist positions. They are performing a distinctly modern conception of the self, one in which religious tradition is continually negotiated according to personal experience, emotional authenticity, and individual judgment.

RELATED: Feminism and the Death of Christianity: A Warning for Muslims

Democracy’s Demons

Closely related to individualism is what may be termed the “democratic bias,” i.e., the tendency to assume that, because all citizens are politically equal, all judgments are therefore also epistemically equal.

Liberal democracy rests upon the principle of political equality, whereby each citizen is endowed with an equal vote regardless of education, expertise, or intellectual ability.

While this principle concerns political legitimacy, modern democratic culture has progressively transformed it into a broader cultural assumption, namely, that every opinion deserves equal epistemic standing simply because it is “sincerely” held.

This represents a profound departure from the Islamic conception of knowledge. Islam has never treated all opinions as equal. Rather, it distinguishes rigorously between the ‘alim (knowledgeable scholar) and the jahil (ignorant person), between the mujtahid (the highest calibre of scholar, having mastered of all the Islamic sciences and is capable and qualified to derive rulings from the sources of the Shari’ah, like the founding imams of the four Sunni madhhabs) and the muqallid (those not capable or qualified to derive rulings from the sources of the Shari’ah and are therefore bound to defer to and follow those that are).

As Allah ﷻ asks: “Are those who know equal to those who do not know?” (Qur’an 39:9). Likewise, He commands: “Ask the people of knowledge if you do not know.” (Qur’an 16:43).

Epistemic hierarchy is therefore not an unfortunate necessity in Islam but part of the divine order itself.

Modern democratic culture, however, habituates individuals to flatten these distinctions. If one’s political judgment holds exactly as much weight as that of everyone else in the electoral sphere, it becomes psychologically easy to extend the same logic to religion.

The result is an implicit democratization of Islamic authority, wherein the opinion of a social media influencer or even one’s own personal intuitions is regarded as having equal footing as centuries of juristic scholarship.

The issue is no longer simply disagreement with the ‘ulama’. Rather, the very notion of scholarly authority is subtly undermined by a cultural environment that has accustomed individuals to equating political equality with intellectual equality.

Ironically, this democratic confidence in the judgment of the average citizen has itself been subjected to substantial criticism within modern political science and political philosophy.

Bryan Caplan, in The Myth of the Rational Voter, argues that democratic electorates are not merely uninformed but, rather, they are often systematically irrational, persistently holding biased beliefs even when confronted with contrary evidence.

Similarly, Ilya Somin has documented the prevalence of widespread political ignorance among democratic populations, while Jason Brennan has argued that the assumption that all citizens possess equal political competence is empirically untenable.

Consequently, when individuals insist that “my interpretation is just as valid as that of the scholars,” what they are expressing is not an authentically Islamic epistemology but, instead, an assumption inherited from modern democratic culture: that equality before the ballot box entails equality before truth.

RELATED: RICE: Why Does the US Want to Spread Democracy?

Social Media’s Dopa-Mined Brains

Another, perhaps more immediately visible, factor is the emergence of what might be called algorithmic culture: a digital environment in which algorithms systematically reward emotional intensity, novelty, outrage, and transgression over reflection, nuance, and intellectual discipline.

As we all know, social media platforms are not “neutral channels of communication.” they are attention-maximizing systems designed to increase user engagement.

As a result, content that provokes indignation, reinforces existing biases, or presents itself as radically counter-cultural is algorithmically amplified, while sober, methodical, and qualified discourse struggles to compete. This is by design.

Novel, emotionally salient, and socially rewarding stimuli activate the brain’s reward circuitry – particularly the mesolimbic dopaminergic pathway involving structures such as the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and the nucleus accumbens.

Dopamine itself is not simply the “pleasure molecule,” as is often popularly claimed. Rather, it is deeply involved in motivation, reinforcement learning, and the anticipation of reward.

The intermittent and unpredictable reinforcement characteristic of social media (likes, reposts, comments, and sudden bursts of visibility) resembles a variable-ratio reward schedule, one of the most powerful mechanisms for reinforcing behavior known in behavioral psychology.

The consequence is not merely addiction to technology but the gradual reshaping of one’s intellectual habits: the pursuit of truth gives way to the pursuit of engagement; careful reasoning yields to performative certainty; scholarship is displaced by virality.

Within such an ecosystem, the most provocative religious claims are often the most successful, not because they are the most accurate but because they are the most emotionally stimulating.

A measured exposition of the classical Islamic tradition rarely generates the same attention as short confrontational videos denouncing “Muslim men,” accusing the ‘ulama’ of irrelevance, or framing centuries of scholarship as “patriarchal oppression” or “misogyny.”

This algorithmic environment therefore functions as a powerful accelerator of modern ideological currents: individualism encourages the sovereign self; democratic culture persuades the individual that his or her opinion carries equal epistemic weight; algorithmic media then rewards the public performance of that autonomy with attention, validation, and social capital.

The result is a feedback loop in which transgression is not only “intellectually justified” but psychologically reinforced. What was once an exceptional opinion gradually becomes an identity, and what begins as dissent is transformed into a source of status, influence, and material reward.

…Which Wave?

Finally, feminism itself must be situated within its own historical trajectory. If the preceding factors explain the intellectual and psychological conditions that make such rhetoric possible, feminism provides its most immediate ideological expression.

In this sense, feminism is perhaps the final explanatory layer rather than the first.

The history of feminism is commonly divided into several “waves.” Perhaps a quick summary here would be useful for the readers:

First-wave feminism (roughly the 19th and early 20th centuries) focused primarily on legal and political equality, most notably property rights, access to education, and women’s suffrage.

Second-wave feminism (1960s–1980s) shifted attention from formal legal equality to the transformation of social institutions, challenging traditional family structures, gender roles, and sexual morality.

Third-wave feminism (1990s–2000s) emphasized subjectivity, identity, and the rejection of universal conceptions of womanhood, incorporating postmodern critiques of truth and essentialism.

Fourth-wave feminism, usually associated with the rise of social media, combines many third-wave assumptions with digital activism, intersectionality, and an emphasis on online mobilization, public denunciation, and the exposure of perceived systemic oppression.

At first glance, figures such as this Ayah appear to fit most naturally within this fourth wave. Her discourse appears to be mediated almost entirely through algorithmic platforms. It relies heavily on personal testimony, structural narratives of gendered oppression, and the viral dynamics of digital outrage.

Yet, to attribute her outlook exclusively to contemporary feminism would overlook the deeper philosophical continuity running throughout the feminist tradition.

Although the objectives of each wave differ, they are united by a progressively expanding conception of autonomy: the first wave sought liberation from legal constraints; the second from social and familial constraints; the third from fixed identities and inherited norms; the fourth extends this logic into the digital sphere, where identity itself becomes publicly performed and continually renegotiated before an online audience.

The external manifestations evolve, but the underlying movement consistently pushes toward the increasing sovereignty of the autonomous individual over inherited structures of authority.

From an Islamic perspective, this continuity demonstrates that even the seemingly “moderate” demands of first-wave feminism were largely articulated within the broader liberal framework discussed earlier, a framework that begins by treating the individual as the primary moral unit whose rights precede communal obligations and whose autonomy constitutes the highest political value.

Once this premise is accepted, subsequent developments become philosophically intelligible: if the autonomous individual is the ultimate source of legitimacy, there remains no principled limit to the continual expansion of claims for self-determination.

What begins as a demand for “legal equality” can, over successive generations, develop into a broader challenge to religious authority, family hierarchy, sexual ethics, and ultimately any norm perceived as externally imposed.

In conclusion, liberal premises possess an internal logic, and feminism, as one of liberal modernity’s most influential movements, illustrates how those premises have unfolded over time.

In that sense, contemporary Muslim feminist rhetoric should be understood not as a historical anomaly but as one manifestation of a much longer intellectual trajectory rooted in the modern elevation of autonomous human reason and desire over divinely revealed authority.

RELATED: Muslim Feminism and the Lie That Islam Doesn’t Force Women to Do Anything