The Rise and Fall of the Gaza Converts

Interesting:

…In a 2025 talk at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, researcher Dan Nilsson DeHanas discussed his research on Gen Z Muslims at university campuses in the U.K. and Australia. DeHanas said that the internet has created “a sense of perpetual solidarity” between Muslims and converts who are coming to Islam through a postmodern personal bricolage, concern for traditionally progressive causes like Palestine and climate change (the effects of which are felt keenly in the Middle East and North Africa, where many Muslims live), and the pursuit of “main character energy,” which he defines as “This sense that you’re actually engaging in the plot of something that’s real and exciting, like a feature film. You can’t just sit in the back. You have to go and drive the bus, or be right in the middle of everything.”

That impulse—to live faith as performance, to experience belief as a kind of public participation—also helps explain how quickly the online fervor curdled. The “revert wave” crested at the exact moment when Gaza dominated every conversation. But attention is its own ecosystem, and as Gaza faded from the algorithmic spotlight, so did the reverts’ audience.

Meanwhile, the antisemitic and misogynistic rhetoric of some online Muslim influencers, including reverts, became harder and harder to ignore. Kari, a woman who converted to Islam because of Gaza and posts about her reversion under the handle @izdzdaan, regularly intersperses videos of herself in hijab calling for decolonization in the name of missing indigenous two-spirit women with reposts of Tucker Carlson’s anti-Israel videos. Even some of the young Muslim women who spoke to DeHanas’ research team said that the misogyny is leaping off the screen and into real life, where young men they don’t know feel free to weigh in on how they dress and act. It “seems more possible today to say more radical things than you would have said before,” DeHanas said…

Source: The Rise and Fall of the Gaza Converts