Normally, when someone takes their Shahadah, it is a community affair, with a cavalcade of “Masha Allah’s” from the congregation at a masjid and numerous offers of support. While there is still more work to be done, the strides American Islamic leadership has made are something truly impressive, and we pray Allah rewards all of the individuals who worked to make the journey easier for our new brothers and sisters. However, there is a demographic that is often unheard: revert youth. It makes sense; it’s harder for these people to get out into the community, especially with the prevalence of Islamophobia within many communities across the US. Far too many teenagers and young adults convert in households where their faith carries the risk of them getting disowned or even facing the threats of physical violence and are thus forced to keep it secret. It’s significantly harder for these people to visit other Muslims, let alone share their unique jihad (struggle) in an understandable way.

While it is harder to reach these young individuals, it is something that will carry immense barakah not just in the hereafter but also in building the next generation of leadership that can, insha Allah (God willing), carry on our advocacy work after we’re gone and build upon the progress we’ve made. These teens have such strong potential that is currently being buried by the difficulties they face daily; if we can create safer spaces and make it easier to reach out for help, we can address these issues before they become far worse.This is where I will focus the majority of this post, as leadership is typically not aware of what these platforms are like. We’ll start by going over where these reverts go to learn about Islam, then into the flaws within these communities and how they affect the people within them; finally, we’ll go over potential solutions to these problems and how we can assist someone coming from these circumstances.

Where are the Youth?

As stated, many of these reverts are terrified to go to the masjid, partially due to struggling with social anxiety but also because it is next to impossible for them to visit safely. So, after they take their shahada, what do they do?

Many will turn to platforms already familiar to them: Discord, Instagram, TikTok, etc.

While there is some beneficial content available, there is also just as much, if not more, that is actively misleading or worse content from deviant sects or cults trying to pick off those without proper support. The online chatrooms are similar; speaking from experience, many of the people I met in these communities have been instrumental in helping me become comfortable with my faith and, eventually, use what I’ve learned to help others do the same. On the flip side, I have seen just as many, if not more, become hubs of misinformation and toxicity due to a lack of oversight from official organizations and scholars. For the sake of brevity, this is where I will focus the majority of this post, as leadership is typically not aware of what these platforms are like.

How are these reverts affected?

The drawbacks of these online spaces tend to affect new Muslims in ways that are not always seen in in-person communities. While these types seem like a minority, some of the most prevalent Islamic chatrooms have upwards of fifty thousand people; how many of which do you think are reverts?

How many of which are going to step into the community and find that they can’t fit in because leadership isn’t equipped to help them?

How many are going to apostate before they even hit that point due to the spiritual damage caused by learning improperly?

That is a lot of lost souls, and exactly why we need to know these things so that we can relate to people coming from this background.

Misinformation

Due to the lack of proper scholars on the internet, many of these reverts end up blindly trusting the friends they make in these chatrooms- I mean, what other choice do they have- but in many cases, their friends aren’t teachers and don’t have the experience to understand how to break down topics in a comprehensible way, assuming they understand how Islam functions academically.

What this creates is an environment where potential students are taught without a rhyme or reason. This approach means that the spiritual benefits of the facts they are learning aren’t passed on, creating numerous flaws within the believers.

sectarianism

Without a spiritual basis, ilm (beneficial knowledge) can become damaging knowledge by breeding arrogance. The most common way that this manifests is by separating yourself from the majority and viewing everyone else as a deviant; at best, this is incredibly dangerous; at worst, this leads to the person experiencing this type of spiritual illness to push away all help and spiral alone.

There are several topics that, when taught incorrectly, lead to this mentality, namely:

• Salafism: A significant portion of young people online will form overly rigid opinions, going as far as to takfir well-loved scholars because that’s the model their friends set.
• Aqidah Issues: Aqidah does not have to be a complex topic; however, in online chatrooms it is common to read far too deeply into issues they are not ready for and then become so convinced that they’re right that they start fighting with teachers that try to correct them.
• Madhabs: Similar to Salafism, learning the madhabs incorrectly leads to an unbalanced approach where a student either becomes far too attached to their own understanding of the madhab they choose and refuses to consider the others as valid. Or far more commonly, they dismiss the concept entirely, convinced that even though over fourteen hundred years of Islamic scholarship uphold this system and the great imams that built it.

Neurotism

The Qur’an and all of its requirements weren’t sent down in a day; rather, Allah sent down each detail as the companions became ready for them, allowing for steady spiritual progress and setting them up to build the following generations up. In the modern day, it’s more important than ever to keep this principle as people enter the deen in droves. Much of our leadership understands this keenly. However, the younger muslims in these chatrooms may not have internalized this lesson yet, and when dealing with a new Muslim, may unintentionally overload them, making them feel like if they don’t uproot their life and implement everything at once, they’re failing. I have met people who came from this background who developed symptoms mimicking OCD, which wore them down spiritually, and without the ability to seek help, they apostated.

Case study:

A brother was interested in learning fiqh online, he was referred to some institutes by well meaning individuals, however, what they didn’t and had no way of knowing was that they just weren’t ready to take that step. The result? He became even more obsessive about their practice than they were before, fueling a condition called Waswâs al-qahri, “overwhelming whispers” aka religious OCD. Shaitan was able to take advantage of their pre-existing anxiety to consistently convince him that his practice wasn’t good enough. He took up to thirty minutes just to make wudhu, repeated every salah multiple times, which dampened the spiritual benefit within Allah’s commandments. In the case the brother was able to start seeking help, and is on the path towards addressing this anxiety, but these spiritual diseases are preventable. We need more voices aware of the principles of tazkiya (spiritual purification), and what it actually means to be ready to learn to speak on platforms where the youth will see. To those who may struggle with these feelings remember, humans are made to try to improve and do better, we are not made to be right. Stumbling and falling over is apart of life and it’s important that instead of worrying constantly about the fall we focus on learning how to get back up and brush off our knees.

Cult Recruitment

One of the worst scenarios is someone taking advantage of the fact that these people are isolated to trick them into entering a heretical sect or a flat-out a cult. The methods they use are rather insidious, aiming to “pull aside” their target to feed them incorrect information and poison them against the wider community. They want to present themselves as a friendly figure who only has their best interests in mind, so they’ll give gifts, love bomb, etc all to make the revert dependent on them, knowing that they lack a proper frame of reference.

Case study:

Back in 2019, a nineteen-year-old man converted to Islam after a prolonged period of mental health difficulties. In this case, he was in a position where he could go to the masjid safely; however, he wasn’t noticed by the leadership. Instead, it was a random brother pulling him aside with what seemed to be a simple warning:

“These guys, they’re not on the right path, be careful.” This was then followed up with an offer to connect him with a madrasa in another state,

In reality, though, It was an extremist compound.

While there, he was taught many things not a part of the deen, which caused immense spiritual damage. A small Islamic community was willing to help him leave and set him up at their own school to help with course correction.

Unfortunately, they were not equipped to help this individual and pushed him to take on new rulings when they should have been working with him to rebuild his connection to Allah. This mistake would push him further out of Sunni circles and, unfortunately, into progressive circles, which introduced advanced concepts like philosophy and rewrote foundational rulings to match modern Western social standards.

For example, it is common to misuse hadiths to claim that hijab isn’t fard.

This manipulation would eventually lead this brother to become so confused that he left the deen.

Online and Foreign Marriages

With the lack of online outreach, many reverts who are in difficult households become willing to resort to extreme measures. The worst of which include marrying themselves off without a wali. There are numerous routes for these people to do this: chatrooms, lying about their age on “Muslim” dating apps, etc.

I don’t think I have to emphasize how dangerous this is and the sheer amount of harm they do themselves before they even have a chance to start their lives. These marriages are predictably unstable and/or abusive, as many unsavory parties will agree to these marriages because they want someone who isn’t aware of those rights, so there isn’t anyone forcing them to fulfill them. A wali isn’t a magic fix to this problem; however, when a member of Islamic leadership is involved, they can at least verify that the couple-to-be knows each other’s rights, that both parties are who they say they are, and that there are no major red flags. But when family and guardianship are removed, there are no protections.

Case Study:

A seventeen-year-old girl converted to Islam in a household that did not support her faith. After a while, she began looking for a way out and unfortunately landed on marriage. So she lied about her age and started using one of the most popular “Islamic Courtship” apps. The man she married was nearly old enough to be her father and was all the way in Egypt, so a woman who was unknown to the Islamic community, whose only family is in America, was planning on leaving the country to live with a much older man who had not been vetted. Fortunately, shortly after they completed their nikah, COVID hit, and she didn’t go through with it; they divorced, but not without a heavy amount of emotional manipulation from the groom’s end.

In her case, she is still Muslim, but this shows the lengths some of these reverts are forced to go because she didn’t have the connections needed to ask for help, and thus resorted to the nuclear option.

What can be done

As we make progress against Islamophobia across the country, young people will be able to convert safely and with less judgement, and their parents will be more likely to want to connect them to legitimate in-person programs. However, at the same time, the number of revert youth living like this is in the tens of thousands, and if we don’t try to reach them in their spaces, they will continue to throw themselves into danger or gain hard-to-treat spiritual illnesses.

We can do this by speaking to our youth about how they interact with the internet and establishing ourselves on the same platforms. Keeping up with the latest trends on social media isn’t easy, but this is where we should remember the importance of teamwork.

Additionally, official hotlines can give those in unsafe households a lifeline they can reach out to when they convert; we already have high-quality Q&A lines, we just need to advertise them more widely and include additional ones for emotional support and resources to help these teens connect with safe spaces.

A note on potential

I mentioned that there is untapped potential beneath the difficulty these individuals are facing, and it would be a disservice not to highlight what that looks like. There are very young individuals who have managed to build sprawling communities with intricate Q&A systems, who started hosting their own events in the absence of those run by sheikhs and scholars that are of surprisingly high quality. Nowadays, many of them are attending seminary, albeit online, because they want to fix the flaws present online. I would know because this is the background that I came from; I converted shortly before I turned eighteen, and as someone who resided in an Islamophobic household, I didn’t have anyone to turn to, so to find a community, I turned to a familiar platform: Reddit. From Reddit, I found a Discord community; it was in that chatroom that I picked up the foundations of Islam. From those chatrooms, I was referred to official institutes where I started a formalized education before finding Embrace. Nowadays, I hold a certification in Islamic Studies and I’m working up towards alimiyah courses; in my personal life I strive to pay it forward and so I’ve run events with over a hundred attendees a week. All of this progress wouldn’t have happened had the right people not recognized my potential and helped me find those initial resources. 

My story is not particularly unique, but where I was able to persevere and received assistance, several others weren’t able to and became lost. It’s important that these stories don’t stay hidden for the sake of building up the next generation of reverts because more people enter Islam like this than you think, and they deserve help just as much as any other revert.