Milahan’s Dark Philosopher's Corner

Assalamu alaikum fam. Hope you're doing well. So this is a bit tense of a topic, but I think it should be said.

I started to see Milan's videos before she announced her conversion to Islam. Though, to be honest, I couldn't sit through most of them because they're rather long and somewhat rambling. I appreciated that she was reading, valuable works, interesting works, to her viewers, interspersed with her comments and observations. Milan gained a considerable following when she responded to a video, criticizing Mufti Menck for his knitting video, and she got a lot of followers when Mufti Menck, recognized her or acknowledged her for a video that she had made thanking him for his positive influence. When I knew that she had an interest in Islam, I was happy for her and wished her the best.

Obviously, accepting Islam would be the best thing that could happen to her, but I expected a lot of bumps in the road given her own background, which she had shared extensively online, and her own idiosyncratic perspective on things. It's clear that her life has done her a lot of damage, and, definitely, Islam could heal all of that, but it might go down like a jagged little pill. As a revert myself, I'm familiar with the inner conflicts and struggles that new Muslims go through trying to recalibrate their views and perspectives, their understanding, and making sense of their own life experiences in the context of Islam, plus immersing yourself into another culture while still valuing many of the aspects of your own culture.

As more and more Americans are mentally ill, losing religions, becoming more psychotic, it's really terrifying.

I should say Milan produces a lot of content. I mean, a lot. It isn't unusual for her to produce three or more videos a day, each being perhaps twenty minutes or more in length. Sometimes she's reading from a book, interspersed with her comments and observations, and sometimes she's just talking in a sort of stream of consciousness manner, verbalizing her thoughts like documenting the progression of her thinking on any given issue. So we can see that Milan spends a great deal of time online.

It appears to not only be her main outlet, but also her main arena for interaction. From what she says, it seems that she spends around three hours a day browsing news sites that reinforce her opinions. Conservative right wing conspiracy theory sorts of portals that see Western civilization being on the verge of collapse due to LGBT activists, feminists, atheists, Democrats. So that's at least four to five hours online if you include making her own videos, plus her frequent shorts and blog posts. She says she's also in university, so presumably has coursework to do and assigned texts to read, in addition to her eclectic book list that she goes through on YouTube and her perusal of Islamic materials.

She also works out and, I guess, makes candles. I have found myself wondering how exactly she earns an income when she seems to spend most of her day online. Predictably, after announcing her conversion to Islam, she apparently has been approached by numerous Muslim men for marriage. At least one of these prospects appears to have progressed to a serious level of discussion, and I think led to her series of very pointed personal and bizarre videos, casting aspersions on mature virgins and touting the virtues of having led a promiscuous lifestyle.

Some women have a lot of experience in bed. When they have experience in bed, you won't feel the need to search for something else. If virgins were so special, no man would pay attention to a stripper, a prostitute, or a brothel keeper. Yes. Maybe you do want a 22 year old version who she's just gonna lay on her back and, you know, wait until your ten minutes is over.

Virgin men are not, you know

My initial reaction to these videos was that she was making them to castigate a particular man, probably a born Muslim, probably an Arab, who had rejected her for marriage because of her own sexual history and the fact that she has a child. Subsequently, this became clearer in her blog post in which she mentioned a former suitor who was spamming her. She named him and accused him of being a pervert.

I had conversations with someone who was from Egypt, and he was a 30 year old virgin. I felt horrified. I can never marry somebody that old who's a virgin. They're probably going to be a pervert or a pedophile.

So Malan appeared to be acting like a woman scorned, but her videos have been getting more and more aggressive, showing serious contempt for basic Islamic morality and zero regret or remorse for her lifestyle in Jahiliyah. Her response to anyone who criticizes her, no matter how respectfully they do it, is venomous. Mahdi Tijani made a quite thorough response video to one of her videos, and it was quite respectful and reasoned. But rather than listening to him or answering any of his points, she just insulted him. She also insults any women who do not subscribe to her theory that promiscuous women make better wives.

In one of her latest videos, she literally calls them monsters.

You're a monster. You're an absolute monster. You're an arrogant virgin monster.

And she preaches that being divorced by your husband, falling into prostitution, or drug addiction are all things that can just happen without any build up, without any reason, without any choice, like a tornado or an earthquake. A failed marriage and a descent into indecency are apparently all things that can just occur without warning, like an active nature or a weather change.

Do not get overly cocky by thinking that you can never be next.

And women who make the right decisions are no better than women who make the wrong decisions. Women who obey Allah are not any better off or safer than women who do not.

Do not think that you are somehow superior because you haven't fallen yet.

She's not only having a hard time internalizing, absorbing, or understanding Islamic values, she's actively berating them and trying to undermine belief in them. And I suspect that she's doing all of this as a radical reflexive response to being spurned by a Muslim man who preferred to marry a virgin. Of course, I could be wrong, but if I am, that would be even more concerning. It's one thing for a woman to overreact and throw the baby out with the bathwater. We're used to that.

Prophet Muhammad already told us that women have a tendency to do that. If a husband is good to his wife all the time, but then she sees one small thing in him that she's likely to say, I've never seen any good in him. That's why the majority in the hellfire are women, and this tendency manifests itself in more ways than just her ingratitude and subjectivity towards her husband. Women often overreact, and no one needs to take that seriously. But if Milan is saying the things that she's saying because she actually believes them, that's more troubling, and it calls into question her real motives for announcing her conversion.

Every revert I have ever known is horrified to look back at their life in Jahiliyah. Milan's videos contain no remorse, no regret, there's no istighfar, no tawba. There's only self justification, self rationalization, and even pride in what we are led to believe is an extensive history of zina, of all which was worth it because she attained prowess in the bedroom. And she seems quite angry that this prowess is not enough to attract a Muslim husband. It turns out that that bargaining chip is less valuable than she thought.

The best thing Milan can do, in my opinion, would be to get offline, move to a Muslim country, and live in Muslim society for a few years. She does not appear to have the humility most reverts have, to be open to learning and processing knowledge without feeling the need to willfully interpret that knowledge and information for the purpose of self exoneration, and part of that may be due to living too much online. I was hoping for Milan that her story would be, like so many reverts, one of self correction through Islam, but what I'm seeing so far is just a testament to the tragic intellectual and psychological damage Western culture inflicts on women.