Back about a year ago when I was in the miserable Salafi hellhole, I thought that Islam was this evil force whose only purpose was to make the masses complete slaves, incapable of thinking past a certain framework. To destroy in the name of "reformation" and to strip away the joy of life while reaching for the hereafter.
Salafism made me think that anyone who didn't follow the rigid, ultra dogmatic structure of Islam was a Kafir, and all Muslims do is pray all day, destroy everything "haram" and speak badly about others. Well, cut back to reality and I see none of that. I never meet these people IRL.
Even on the internet, I cleansed my feed. It went from Salafi reels talking about stuff that was haram or whatever, to ordinary Muslims doing things like playing guitar, having fun, making art, etc. and they were all somehow related to Islam targeted for a Muslim audience, and all of these reels get hundreds of thousands of likes, whereas the Salafi or lecture ones only got maybe from 3k-50k.
So really even online, Salafis aren't a loud minority. It was just I purposely CHOSE to surround myself with Salafis, so that's why everything looked so bleak.
I started learning about Islamic history and cultures that Muslims are a part of, from the Rashiduns, to the Abbasids, to the Ottomans, to the Mughals, to the Malians, to the Swahili city-states... And I was amazed.
And then I kind of had an upbringing, realized that spending hours on the internet all day was doing me no good, and decided to actually go back to talking to Muslims in my life again IRL. They're nothing like the fundamentalist demons I encountered in some spaces.
Once I surrounded myself with regular Muslims again, things looked more colorful. I started to realize that Muslims aren't these demons that ex-Muslims, Islamophobes and even a lot of people in this sub make them out to be. They're just... people who live regular lives, think like regular people and enjoy regular things.
Even most of the BS you hear online about "Muslim countries being nightmares to live in" come from Westerners and Hindutvas who have never stepped foot into them, and just parrot whatever Islamophobic narrative they hear on the internet.
And then there's the talk about my home country Bangladesh turning into an "Islamist Shariah hellhole" that I keep seeing. Well, I live here and the music and film industry is doing better than ever... Natoks are getting millions of views in just a few hours on YouTube and majority of the women here still wear sarees/regular hijab. TBH, it's as expected, a lot of such claims are from chronically online people (most living in the West, for some reason) who get their perception of reality through Facebook bots.
Not saying people here aren’t still defending stuff like SA and child marriages, cuz they definitely are… but that’s literally been Bangladesh since forever. Nothings changed smh.
This might be controversial and feel free to disagree with me. But the threat of Salafism is not as big as people here make it out to be. Most Muslims are, well, moderate. Most don't care about what some random lecturer on Facebook has to say. Most Muslims are still heavily culturally inclined and aren't chronically online enough to doomscroll through fatwas or care what some random Redditor has to say.
It's just due to the internet amplifying certain voices, the extremes get more attention.
But even then, I haven't seen anything related to Salafism in a really, really long time. I almost completely forgot that there were Muslims who see music, movies, drawing, etc. as haram, especially considering all the Muslims I met love those things, especially among the older (and more conservative) generation.
So yeah, the internet is not a reflective of reality at all. Most Westerners are not pro-Israel, most Muslims are not Fundamentalists, most Hindus are not Hindutvas, etc.
I feel like a lot of people in this sub need to hear this. I do understand that some of yall might have grown up in extremely restrictive communities, but for those in less restrictive environments who used to shackle themselves with internet hellholes like I have... I can promise you, reality is far less grim than people make it out to be sometimes...