Has Haqiqatjou been colonized? Analyzing MuslimSkeptic.com's endorsement of evolutionary psychology

     The Muslim Skeptic is the name given to a neo-Salafi online space run and managed by one Daniel Haqiqatjou, who has become well-known in internet dawah circles for being one of the most outspoken and controversial of the major Islamic apologists. Unlike his more moderate (or perhaps sheepish) peers, Haqiqatjou has willingly gone on the offensive against a wide variety of taboo topics, such as technology, western colonization, conspiracies, and the Coofid narrative - and this unique level of intestinal fortitude has led to an explosion of popularity and online presence --- his Youtube channel (also called "The Muslim Skeptic") has nearly 400,000 subscribers as of February 2024, having almost doubled in a little over a year. A good deal of this growth has paralleled the general finding of many social surveys that the Islamic world is de-secularizing rapidly, especially among the youth (a finding which has been gleefully covered many times on the Muslim Skeptic website itself). 

    Haqiqatjou has become known for his extraordinary willingness to "poke the bear" and rouse the rabble against the western liberal doctrines that are often tacitly held by many American and Western European Muslims who fear that expressions of their native culture might lead to right-wing backlash. Whereas most Islamic dawah apologists in the West have tried to acclimate Islam to western liberal values by dispensing with cultural relativism and promoting a sanitized, liberalized version of Islam that can evolve with the times, Haqiqatjou notably scoffs at such attempts and staunchly defends even the most controversial positions (from the western perspective). He has gone on record promoting the Prophet Muhammad's marriage to Aisha (said to be consummated at the age of nine) as an adaptive cultural mechanism, and proudly promotes the death penalty for blasphemers, open atheists, and open practicioners of homosexuality. In addition, Haqiqatjou has often called out other Muslims whom he sees as practicing a less-than-perfect, less-than-pure version of Islamic dogma (which in his mind must be Athari or neo-Salafi). In most cases, his foes within the ummah have consisted of liberalized western Islamic groups or individuals like the Yaqeen Institute, Shabir Ally, or Suhaib Webb; he has also been known to criticize and attack Sufis as well, even in spite of the fact that tasawwuf has a very ancient tradition going back to the earliest centuries of Islam, and is actually much more "traditional" in most areas of the Islamic world than modern Salafism which he promotes. 

    Haqiqatjou is, like most internet celebrities in what can be broadly called the "alternative media" or "truther media", a very mixed bag. He is useful as a counter to the 'Overton window' of mainstream opinions in the west, and he pushes very hard for total decolonization and decoupling of the Middle Eastern/Islamic culture from values, social structures and even technologies that were created and promoted by western imperialism. On the other hand, he has a tendency to undermine his own mission by what amounts to fedposting on a grand scale (the aforementioned defense of child marriage comes to mind), he creates tension and division within his own dawah community in his quest for fundamentalistic purity, and (perhaps most perniciously of all for a non-interventionist like myself) his treatment of Sufis and non-Salafis in general indicates that he is every bit as imperialistic and anti-traditional in some ways as his liberal foes. In other words, while Haqiqatjou has the potential to inflict a lot of damage to the zombie-neoliberal structure that we are currently suffering under, at the end of the day he is just another used-ideology salesman, and one would be well advised to think twice before banking on his solutions to our current situation.

    With all this context, it is both surprising and unsurprising to find that Haqiqatjou's flagship website, MuslimSkeptic.com, is now giving the green light to the very controversial field of study known as evolutionary psychology. Surprising because Haqiqatjou and company are anti-evolution, to the point of holding creationist doctrines that are not themselves even necessary for Islam (Muslim narratives are a great deal more open to the possibility of evolution and a very old universe than literal interpretations of Christianity or Judaism). Meanwhile, most of the harshest critics of the contemporary discipline of evolutionary psychology or "evo-psych" are actually favorable to the theory of evolution itself, although they usually dispense with the Victorian presuppositions of classic Darwinian theory. 

    Unsurprising because evolutionary psychology is basically a front for political and social activism which falls in line with much of what Haqiqatjou is trying to accomplish. Because evo-psych is such a controversial field and lacks mainstream support from contemporary "leftist" academia, its proponents have generally sought to capture converts outside the Ivory Tower by attaching themselves to various anti-leftist movements ranging from the neocon-centrism of Sam Harris and Stephen Pinker to the 'red pill'/men's movement of Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate to the far right and the white-nats. The recent conversion to Islam of prominent manospherists like Tate and Sneako has created a pipeline by which a lot of these evo-psych ideas can be (and are being) trojan-horsed into Islamic discourse. And the Muslim Skeptic website is now aiding and abetting that Trojan horse. 

    Let's analyze exactly what evo-psych's philosophy of the world has become, and why this is so dangerous to the survival of traditional Islamic cultures. Hud Lesprit, the author of the above article, states the following:

    "Darwin’s evolutionary theory, a cornerstone of this science, suggests that every trait and quirk to be found in living beings has been refined by the relentless process of natural selection. This is complemented by the theory of mate selection, which posits that our attributes are the result of what best ensured the perpetuation of our ancestors."

    

    Here we see immediately that Charles Darwin is the 'cornerstone' of evolutionary psychology. This should hardly seem shocking or even unexpected, given Darwin's pre-eminence in Euro-American thought as the one who supposedly 'discovered' evolution by natural selection (in reality, similar theories were being floated about in the Islamic world some five centuries earlier, and in Hindu India as far back as the Vedic period). If Darwin was not in fact the founder of evolutionary biology, then what is the reason for his pre-eminence? The answer is that he was the one who standardized the theory of evolution by sexual selection that is used in the West today. Emphasis on "west" and "today". It was through Darwin that scientists began to dogmatize the Victorian understanding of gender roles, male and female 'nature' and human behavior by projecting it onto the entire animal kingdom. It was Darwin who gifted us such grand beliefs as the 'scientific' and 'universal' basis for such uniquely western myths as "men are competitive, women are cooperative", "men are opportunistic maters, women are choosy maters", and perhaps, best of all, "men need sex, women give sex opportunistically". AKA Briffault's Law, which is falsely attributed to the armchair-anthropologist Robert Briffault (in reality Briffault never had an original idea in his life), but was in fact formulated by Charles Darwin more than half a century earlier. When Lesprit describes the Darwinian influence on "mate selection" theory, this is precisely what he means: Darwin, and by extension most of mainstream evolutionary psychology, dogmatize Victorian stereotypes as scientific fact. 

    Lesprit then moves on to quote heavily from a prominent evolutionary psychologist named David Buss (more on him in a bit):

    "More than a century ago, Charles Darwin offered a revolutionary explanation, sexual selection theory, for the mysteries of mating. He had become intrigued by the puzzling fact that some animals have characteristics that hinder their survival. The elaborate plumage, large antlers, and other conspicuous features displayed by many species seem costly in the currency of survival. Peacocks look like a predator’s dream. Not only are peacocks packages of nutritious meat, but they come attached to a long train of brilliant feathers. This train can only encumber a peacock fleeing from predators, and it also serves as a neon sign pointing those predators straight to an easy meal. Darwin’s answer was that the peacocks’ displays evolved because they led to their bearer’s reproductive success by providing an advantage in the competition for desirable peahens. The evolution of characteristics because of their mating benefits, rather than survival benefits, is known as sexual selection. Sexual selection, according to Darwin, takes two forms. In one form, same-sex competition, members of the same sex compete with each other, and the outcome of their contest gives the winner greater sexual access to members of the opposite sex. Two stags locking horns in combat is the prototypical image of this intrasexual competition. The characteristics that lead to success in these contests, such as greater strength, intelligence, or attractiveness to allies, evolve because the victors are able to mate more often and hence pass on genes for the qualities that have led to their success.

 

In the other type of sexual selection, members of one sex choose a mate based on their preferences for particular qualities in that mate. The desired characteristics evolve—that is, increase in frequency over time—because animals possessing them are chosen more often as mates and genes that cause them to be desirable get passed on with greater frequency. Animals lacking the desired characteristics are excluded from mating, and genes for undesirable qualities perish. Since peahens prefer peacocks with plumage that flashes and glitters, dull-feathered males get left in the evolutionary dust. Peacocks today possess brilliant plumage because over evolutionary history peahens have preferred to mate with dazzling and colorful males."

    Of course, the crux of this entire theory centers around the notion of a universal (both within humans and animals) tendency for the males to be the competitive, expendable ones who fight for access to choosy, largely asexual mates. The female (including the human woman) is supposed to fit easily into the mold of Victorian prudery: she begrudgingly gives her sexuality as a gift to the insatiably horny, totally deluded male drunk on his own sex hormones, who has defeated all his opponents and put himself in mortal danger for the 'reward' of sweet poontang. To Darwin, Buss and the entire western Victorian paradigm on which evo-psych theory rests, men are biologically hard wired to be simps. And women are biologically hard-wired to be the e-thots manipulating and taking advantage of male weakness and lack of self-control, by virtue of their superior self-discipline due to their much lower libido. In other words, men are doomed by biology to lose and be dominated and conquered by women.

    This is where it is necessary to point out a few basic facts. If a Venn diagram were drawn between traditional Middle Eastern Islamic narratives surrounding male and female sexuality and the evo-psych narrative listed above, it would amount to two circles completely unconnected to each other. There is not one aspect of traditional Islamic thought that has anything to do with 'red pill' theory of any sort. Were David Buss, a liberal secularist who has appeared on the podcast of Islamophobic genocide-apologist Jordan Peterson, to travel back in time to medieval Baghdad or Persia and spout off on this stuff, he would very quickly become a laughingstock and a homeless beggar dependent on zakat for survival, as insane asylums didn't exist at the time. Classic Middle Eastern culture, like most other non-western cultures throughout history, generally assumed nearly the opposite of what Buss and the evolutionary psychologists present: it is women, not men, who are insatiably horny; it is women, not men, who compete with each other while men are cooperative and have high solidarity within the all-male peer group. In fact, there is a hadith collected by al-Bayhaqi which states that "a woman's sexual desire is 99 times that of a man"; although this hadith is considered relatively weak, in classical hadith studies 'weak' does not equal 'false', and most Muslims in history have assumed that this statement is more or less accurate (meanwhile, there exists no documentation in any traditional Islamic literature, be it hadith, the Quran, philosophy or tafsir that even hints that men are more libidinous that women). 

    In addition, the entire 'scientific' basis for any of these uniquely modern and western myths about sexuality and gender is extremely weak. In reality, both male-male and female-female competition are very common in the animal kingdom, both within and between species. In some cases, slight changes to the ecology can shift the balance from "male competition and female choice" to "female competition and male choice" or vice versa. The more sophisticated evolutionary psychologists like Edward Dutton, Michael Woodley of Menie, or Joyce Benenson understand these nuances (the first two describe themselves as "behavioral ecologists" rather than evolutionary psychologists per se). In fact Benenson, in her book Warriors and Worriers, describes the utter ludicrosity of the claim that women are somehow less competitive than men when incredibly copious evidence to the contrary exists even in our own westernized culture.  Herbert Barry III, a prominent cultural anthropologist, examined many of our modern, western just-so stories about the 'universal' and 'biological' differences between men and women in terms of competitiveness, gregariousness, empathy and a wide variety of other traits and found that they consistently fail to replicate across cultures. In a 1976 study he co-authored with Lili Josephson, Edith Lauer and Catherine Marshall titled "Traits Inculcated In Childhood", competitiveness was equally inculcated among boys and girls in more than half of the 186 pre-industrial cultures he studied. In 1991, he co-authored the book Adolescence, an anthropological inquiry, with Alice Schlegel; they found that in most non-western societies, males were more social, gregarious, and 'people-oriented' than females, and our familiar western pattern was actually the W.E.I.R.D. one. Benenson has since replicated these findings time and time again. 

    Buss' research based on highly questionable self-report studies taken during the 1980s and 1990s has done a huge amount of damage to society. He is the author of the myth that women are only attracted to the top 20% of men (a myth that he has since retracted, though the lie has gone all the way around the world and the truth is still trouserless), that women are sexually attracted to money and don't care about looks (turns out that this is only true when women 'love' opportunistically, not idealistically), that monogamy is unnatural and maladaptive for our species (another claim he has since retracted, and with good reason given the anthropological absurdity of this belief given that about 80-90% of hunter-gatherer marriages are monogamous), that men are more capable of 'true love' while women fake being in love in order to get resources from men (ask any girl who has ever had a crush whether she's just cynically daydreaming about being rich, or if she's actually just straight up downbad), basically every single asinine red-pill manosphere purely modern, purely western talking point imaginable is contained in his outdated 1994 book The Evolution of Desire. An outdated, purely western piece of smoldering diarrhea that is now getting the support of the supposedly anti-western, pro-Islamic website "The Muslim Skeptic".

    Lesprit then goes on to claim:

    The primary point of hesitation for many Muslims regarding evolutionary psychology is not in relation to the discipline itself. It is the belief that acknowledging our traits as survival mechanisms somehow automatically validates the entire theory of evolution. Yet, the mere recognition of a function does not necessarily validate the theory as a whole."

    In fact, the primary bone of contention for a traditional Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, or African Muslim is not that it validates the theory of evolution. It's that it validates a western colonial understanding of sexuality and male-female relations. It's that adopting David Buss' framework would be yet another example of allowing the traditional, classical Islamic philosophy regarding love, sex and relationships to be thoroughly colonized by a bizarre western ideology based in post-Enlightenment post-industrial, profoundly maladaptive stereotypes of how men and women operate. We have seen how the Euro-American-Christian world has 'flourished' since it adopted this red pill garbage: record numbers of young men are now incels, depressed, suicidal, and lonely; the entire social order is unravelling; birth rates are far below replacement; people are cynical, distrustful, and miserable, and cannot communicate with the opposite sex. This is a dark, evil future, the work of some shaytan, and Muslims are looking at this chaos unfold in the West and collectively concluding --- accurately --- that "whatever they're doing, we had sure as hell better do the exact opposite!" And nobody can really blame them.

    Lesprit then states:

    "Is it so surprising that a Creator, in His infinite wisdom, would instill in us traits that bolster our chances of survival and ensure the continuity of our species? Would it not be a notable mark of divine craftsmanship for a species to have been designed with the capability to endure and thrive across generations? Imagine a creation that was destined to become extinct after just a few short generations; or a machine that had been designed to fail after very minimal use. Neither of these scenarios would reflect well on the creational prowess of the designer.

In our world, every trait and instinct that we possess serves a purpose. Our behaviors and characteristics are not the mere whims of nature. They are tools of survival, and perhaps they are divinely ordained."

 

   Lesprit seems to have a very poor understanding of what mainstream evolutionary psychologists of the David Buss school actually believe. This is not a worldview based fundamentally in teleology. In fact, it is markedly disteleological. In other words, unlike an Islamic paradigm which sees a fundamental created Order and purpose instilled in everything, due to all of existence emanating from an all-wise, all-merciful Creator, Buss' theories are based in the notion that everything is random organisms acting in total self-interest, without care or concern for any sort of higher goal or purpose. The experience of "falling in love" is not the total transcendental, utterly beautiful merging of two souls into one that it is presented in medieval Islamic romantic poetry, nor is the act of sexuality the ultimate expression of deepest love through total, mutually orgasmic pleasure as is presented in classical Islamic discourses on male and female sexuality. All of this is just a series of clever tricks the evil bitchy woman devises in order to entrap and ensnare men and use them as beta-bux providers who falsely believe they are earning the love and admiration of their significant others. Sex is something that men want --- even need --- and women endure to control men, and the female orgasm is a useless byproduct of evolution with no higher purpose or goal than as a weapon to delude men by faking it. 

    Hud Lesprit would appear to think that it is somehow helpful to the cause of promoting Islam and Islamic cultures, by infecting them with the west's overly cynical brain rot. He is wholly prepared to Trojan-horse some of the most maladaptive and totally destabilizing ideologies into a very vibrant and beautiful traditional culture because some incels on the internet tell him it's "based". And the two times I decided to comment on this blog post, mentioning my concerns about evo-psych and its weaponization, my comments were deleted with no good reason. I'm not saying Haqiqatjou and company glow, but they sure are doing a bad job of helping me believe they don't.