Conversion as Transgression? Islamophilia and/in the Muslim Manosphere

This article profiles and examines the phenomenon of Islamophilia – the admiration of Islam, which has emerged in the contemporary far right and its manosphere elements. We map this contemporary Islamophilia in its longer history of Western modes of carnivalesque transgression and orientalism. We show that the history of casting Islam as other and transgressive (sexually perverse, treatment of others) is repurposed today by the far right to both demonstrate the model of Islam’s conservatism to shield itself from the cultural incursions of liberals, radical left and feminists, and as a warning of Western decline. We then challenge misreadings of Islamophilia through the lens of Sibgatullina and Abbas, who describe the identification of the far right with Islam as “political conversion”. We show that the main issue with this characterisation is that it relies on a secular reading of Islam. In the final sections, we demonstrate the limits of a “political conversion” framing by turning to two prominent manosphere members who converted to Islam: Sneako and Andrew Tate. We reexamine the discourse of the Islamophiliac to argue that their view of the Islamic(ate) is mediated by an orientalist understanding of Islam, which can easily morph into Islamophobia, and that their carnivalesque transgression is deployed to “own the Muslims”.