The Genderfluid Quran Scholars of TikTok

In a recent TikTok, a transgender woman with a faint beard stares into the camera and announces that she has started studying the Quran. “I am really having a revolution of self,” she proclaims, holding up a copy marked with pink sticky notes. Apparently, this individual has recently realized that “The way that I describe the universe and the things that I believe in are actually describing the Quran of believing in Allah.”

This may seem a bit odd for someone who operates an online store selling “Trans People Are Divine” prints, and who otherwise makes TikToks with titles like “Femmes with Facial Hair” and “Having a Gay Day.” But according to her, “The way that the Quran describes things actually makes sense to me. Like, did you know that Allah is beyond gender?”

This transgender person is certainly not the only one with a newfound interest in Islamic studies. A few weeks ago, TikTokers discovered Osama bin Laden’s 2002 anti-America manifesto and made so many videos praising his “alternate view on the Middle East” that the app had to start banning and deleting the content. Now the Quran has become TikTok’s newest trend, as legions of woke, mostly white Gen Z-ers have started encouraging each other to study Islam’s holy book. They use hashtags like #quranbookclub, which has 2.4 million views, and make playlists like “Atheist Reads the Quran.” In fact, when you search “reading” on TikTok, “reading the Quran” is the first auto-suggestion. 

What’s particularly bizarre about this fad is that the overwhelming majority of these new Quran readers are also extremely progressive, with profiles trumpeting every left-wing cause under the sun. One creator making Quran videos provides a self-description of “trans-fem genderfluid mystic” and says that reading has led her to conclude that she’s “felt Muslim [my] whole life.” It seems that these TikTokers, whose pages sing about microaggressions, unexamined biases, and systemic inequality, have not yet stumbled across Quran Verse 4:34, about how “men are the protectors and maintainers of women” who should “beat [them] lightly” if they fear “disloyalty and ill conduct.” Or Verse 33:50, which permits men to have sex with “slave girls [they] possess from among the prisoners of war.” Or Verse 9:5, which exhorts believers to “… slay the idolaters wheresoever you find them, capture them, besiege them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush.” 

And even if they have, they probably wouldn’t mind, because this isn’t actually about a genuine religious interest. Just a few months ago, the same readers insisting that Allah is beyond gender or that they’ve always felt Muslim were cranking out TikToks smearing Christians as white supremacists, colonists, and homophobes, or criticizing organized religion as an oppressive sham. What could have possibly changed since then that encouraged them to begin reading Muslim holy books? Islam isn’t exactly known for its commitment to decolonial projects or gay rights.

It’s no coincidence that nearly all these budding Islamists also happen to have accounts full of #FreePalestine hashtags, Palestinian flag emojis, and five-minute explainers about Israeli apartheid. This is just the latest example of the phenomenon in which the woke warriors assume the mantle of a fashionable culture to which they do not belong in a self-serving ploy for cultural caché. In 2020, everyone was donning kente cloth, taking a knee, and checking their privilege. In 2023, this crowd is wearing keffiyehs, reading the Quran, and joining Queers for Gaza.

This trend is the millionth example of something dangerous and pathological at the heart of the social justice warrior psyche — a complete inability to grasp nuance, and a subsequent insistence on reducing the world to a simple struggle between “oppressed” and “oppressor.”

This trend is the millionth example of something dangerous and pathological at the heart of the social justice warrior psyche — a complete inability to grasp nuance, and a subsequent insistence on reducing the world to a simple struggle between “oppressed” and “oppressor.” These people have decided that Palestinians — and, by extension, Muslims — are the oppressed, and that therefore they must be allies in the wide progressive crusade for justice, standing alongside gays, transgender people, and other people of color (except Middle Eastern Jews). This requires disregarding overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The transgender Quran scholar, for example, also made a viral video arguing that Queers for Palestine is a legitimate form of solidarity because “America for trans people is in stage 7 and 8 of genocide, and Palestine is in [stage] 9 and 10.” 

You can see this logic everywhere, from buzzy think pieces proclaiming that “the queer liberation struggle cannot be disentangled from the anti-imperialist struggle” to colorful viral infographics announcing that “Free Palestine is a Feminist Issue, it’s a Reproductive Rights Issue, it’s an Indigenous Rights Issue, it’s a Climate Justice Issue, it’s an Abolitionist Issue.” They will bend over backwards to justify the glaring contradictions in this framework: like being a feminist who stands with the rapists of Hamas, or a human rights activist who wouldn’t condemn the Oct. 7 massacre. And they will use this logic to bully anyone who dares question their ever-more-sweeping allegiances, accusing them of being a colonizer, a racist, or an Islamophobe.

So does this mean we’re about to have a new generation of gender-fluid Muslim converts? I think not.

Just as they did in 2020, these radical activists will eventually tire themselves out, and find a newer, trendier cause to derive self-worth and a sense of purpose. I give the Quran book club another month before these uber-progressive readers get bored of studying the laws of Islam — even if it makes them sound super-accepting and enlightened on TikTok.

But putting down the Quran won’t solve the problem, because the real issue is why they’re picking it up in the first place. Hardened by propaganda, blinded by misplaced solidarity, and brainwashed by the algorithm, these young social justice crusaders have already decided who is on the right side of history, and they’ll stoop to the most cynical, nonsensical forms of social media gamesmanship to advance the causes they’ve deemed worthy.  It’s a shame — and a real, looming threat to our democratic order — that they’ve been too busy scrolling TikTok to read any history at all.

Dr. Sheila Nazarian is a Los Angeles physician whose family escaped to America from Iran. She stars in the Emmy-nominated Netflix series “Skin Decision: Before and After. “