Middle Nation Podcast (E:4) -- My Complaint about Muslim YouTubers

Everyone. Welcome to the, I guess, fourth episode of the Middle Nation podcast. I hope you can all bear with me as I'm sort of finding my way in the transition of the channel going from to Middle Nation. Inshallah, it will get more organized and coherent in the topics. Moving away from the singular focus on, you know, masculinity and and and all of these issues, moving it towards being able to discuss a broader range of topics over the coming days and weeks and months.

The channel will take a more organized shape, inshaAllah. So someone commented on my video about the conversation between Mohammed Hijab and Jordan Peterson that I seem to have a somewhat negative view of a lot of Muslim figures on YouTube. So I'd like like to address that observation because even though my channel has until now been disproportionately focused on refuting the tumassian YouTubers, Red Pillars, and so on, which made a lot of my content highly critical of the ideas being promoted by certain people, it is actually a pretty fair observation overall. I don't hold most Muslim voices on YouTube in particularly high esteem. That's true.

Part of the reason for this is just my own personality. I can be a pretty inflexible snob intellectually, if I'm being honest. I do genuinely try to give the benefit of the doubt to people and to be as understanding as possible and to be generous as possible, but that never extends to the point of attributing value to what I think is a waste of time at best or counterproductive at worst. And to be honest, I find that most of our representatives online are not producing much value in terms of advancing our understanding or the development of ideas. I hope the direction I'm trying to take this channel will not become one of these useless endeavors, and I hope that I would discontinue the channel if that does become the case.

Just as I am more or less discontinuing the our moon content because I think I've pretty much covered all of the things that I have to say on that issue. Although I will continue to upload as needs be, to that playlist, The Qawamun channel will now be a playlist, and I will update that playlist as needs be if issues arise that I think are relevant to that subject matter. Okay. So here's the problem I have. It's not actually with the people themselves.

It is that too frequently, I feel like they are being elevated to a status or a position for which they are not suited and that this is not due to their own merit but due to the absence absence of better qualified people. Guys who are at most are being taken as scholars, as as intellectuals when they're not even remotely any of those things. Now that's our fault. That's our fault. That's not their fault.

We're the ones who are assigning these traits to them or assigning this role to them, for which they're not qualified. That's our problem. But I also do have an issue with anyone who accepts to be placed in such a rank and status when they must know perfectly well that their main qualification is that they have a webcam or a smartphone and are comfortable talking on camera, but they don't actually know more than the rest of us. Now there are some people who are just hustlers using social media to make money, peddling bad ideas like Petomacin, targeting a certain demographic of disgruntled people or people who already hold certain opinions and have a particular stripe of ignorance. There are people who use the echo chamber dynamics of social media just to achieve some degree of cheap fame and prominence and to make money.

Unfortunately, I think there's a lot of these. But there are also well intentioned people out there who want to use their platforms for dawah and so on. Even if they are not themselves particularly knowledgeable and their content is not really adding anything new that has not been said before. I mean, like, I haven't seen any recent debates with atheists or Christians or ex Muslims that are not basically just regurgitating the points and arguments made decades ago by Ahmed Tidet or Zako Naik, but they are trying to do something useful. And then there is this massive number of people who are a little bit of both, a little bit genuine, a little bit authentic, and a little bit hustler ish.

And I think this problem mostly has to do with what happens with monetization, but I'll probably talk about that in another podcast. But my issue is with people placing themselves or being accepting to be placed in positions that they are not qualified to be in. Now, not talking about credentials. I'm talking about actual qualifications like possession of real knowledge, genuine intellectual depth, you know, actual vision and understanding. What we have are a lot of pretty regular guys with mediocre levels of Islamic knowledge being regarded as great thinkers, scholars, or important contributors to religious and social discourse just because they have YouTube channels or are active on other platforms.

When the reality is that the things they are saying are no different from what you'll hear at almost any gathering of Muslims at an iftar dinner. You know, the the actual level of ideas and the complexity of ideas and what they're saying is the same thing that you would hear from any gathering of brothers at a dinner for Iftar. Nothing any of us says should be treated as particularly important or definitive. Any of us who are online, I'm saying. So it's not so much that I'm critical of the Muslim YouTubers themselves.

I'm critical of the importance and status that is being attributed to them, and I'm critical of them only in so far as they are delusional enough to think they deserve it. So I think we as Muslim social media consumers have to be more discerning in our evaluations of the people we like to watch. You have to know who does and who does not possess significant knowledge and understanding, understanding, who you really should be asking for a fatwa and who you shouldn't be asking, for example. And you have to be able to distinguish when someone is conveying an opinion or an insight that they actually developed in their own mind through their own intellectual processes and through research from someone who is just repeating things they've heard elsewhere. Because it seems to me that perhaps 80 to 90% of social media content is just duplicated from the original content of maybe 10 to 20% of online creators. Creators.

With so many people, if you listen to them for three minutes, you will already know everything that they would say and everything that they believe and every opinion that they hold on any number of other issues because you can recognize that they are essentially reading from a script. So if you're familiar with the script, you don't need to listen to them at all. I already know what you think because I already know the sources you take your opinions from. This is incredibly frustrating to me, and it's almost like our own thought processes are becoming like a version of artificial intelligence whereby everyone's thoughts and opinions are predictive.

Once you know what accounts they follow on Twitter and where they get their news from and what channels they follow on YouTube, they just become mental clones. And you already know every position that they're going to take and every argument that they'll make. We are letting ourselves down very badly when we approach our intellectual lives this way and when we approach our religion this way. One of the most serious vulnerabilities anyone can have, one of the most reliable weaknesses that manipulative people target in us is predictability. So when our thinking becomes predictable, our reactions become predictable, our opinions become predictable, we become incredibly easy to manipulate and exploit.

And our greatest defense against this is authentic, honest, original thought and analysis, The kind of thinking that has come to be called outside the box thinking as if thinking inside a box is just supposed to be the default. As if you're just supposed to automatically accept the parameters of opinion that have been given to you, the framework of discussion, the way issues have been presented, and you're not expected to use your mind independently and analyze information or opinions outside the dictates of standard conformity. But that's exactly what we have to do, and it is what Muslims always used to do throughout the history of and and this is part of what distinguished us as a nation, this judiciousness and meticulous scrutiny. Now of course I put myself at the same level as anyone else. Just because I have a YouTube channel does not mean that I know more than anyone else or that anyone should listen to me.

When I take a critical stance of other Muslims on social media, I'm not implying that I'm better than any of them. I'm simply saying none of us is really worthy of any great degree of influence. Obviously, the moment someone creates a YouTube channel, they are inadvertently announcing to the world that they have an inflated ego and I'm no different. But I also do not determine the value of someone's ideas and opinions based on the number of their followers. That's not ego.

That's just common sense. Now you may have tens of thousands of followers listening to you spout off about all manner of topics, but some girl on another platform has a million followers who just watch her do her makeup. So this is not a measure of value. I would like to see our online community move away from echo chamberism, from personality cultism, and from using these platforms to gain notoriety and money, and start using them with some humility just to brainstorm together, to advance our ideas and approaches to the world, to start cultivating a revival of knowledge and understanding, knowledge that is more like a factory than a warehouse, usable knowledge, knowledge that produces value, and not just to gain respect and personal prestige and influence, but to move us forward as an ummah. Let's not put mediocrity on a pedestal, but let's try to find the people who are truly original thinkers, genuinely knowledgeable people, dynamically intelligent people who possess real erudition and expertise and insight.

And let's not settle for less nor pretend that less is more than it is.