In the months after October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel and the war in Gaza began, a wave of young Americans—mostly progressive women—embraced Islam. Taking to TikTok and Instagram, they called themselves “reverts,” the Muslim term for converts who have returned to the faith of humanity’s origin. For a generation raised on social media activism, the apparent religious conviction of Gazans under bombardment looked like the purest form of authenticity.
Two years later, many of those same converts are quiet on the subject of Gaza—and, facing pushback from within the Muslim community, many have gone quiet on social media altogether. The enthusiasm that once filled TikTok with teary testimonies, hijab tutorials, and verses from the Qur’an has ebbed. The algorithm has moved on, and the women who found God through Gaza have had to learn what faith looks like when the cameras turn elsewhere. The fervor has thinned into a few scattered believers contending with backlash, burnout, and the realities of a faith that doesn’t behave like an online fandom.
Like many converts, these young women were initially full of zeal and excited to share it. But the “reverts” of TikTok have learned the downside of posting through their faith journeys. Among the most prominent progressive reverts is Megan Rice, who came to Islam through progressive advocacy for Palestine after October 7. “Here they are losing everything, quite literally everything,” Rice said in a YouTube interview last year. “but they’re still praying to God.” She said she picked up a Quran and found that it contained that matched her pre-existing concept of God. Around two weeks later, Rice said she reverted.
But the support she first experienced proved short-lived. The heat, she said, is not coming from Islamophobes, but from Muslims themselves. On TikTok, they call them “the Haram Police,” holier-than-thou voices that show up in their social media comments to tell reverts what they’re getting wrong.
Religious gatekeeping is not unique to Islam; plenty of converts have similar stories. But in the world of online religion, where belief unfolds in public, the scrutiny is relentless. “Sometimes I wish I never posted about becoming Muslim on TikTok,” said Abbey Hafez, a Muslim revert living in Dubai, last year. Like Rice, she converted after October 7, drawn to Islam by her support for Palestine.“ I never expected that comments from Muslims would be the ones that are pushing me away from my faith more than the hateful and Islamophobic comments,” she said.
Hafez describes receiving comments and messages “by the hundreds” every day, telling her that she is practicing her faith wrong. She explained in another video last year how she stopped posting about Islam for a time “because I didn’t think that I deserved a space, because I’m not perfect.”
She still describes her faith as “a beautiful flame” she’s managed to protect and tend despite the judgment, but that said, she told her fans in an April video that her content is now going to feature other parts of her life besides her Muslim identity. Now, videos about prayer and Islam class are increasingly mixed in with trendy coffee reviews and cookie tastings.
Despite the many other stories like Rice’s and Hafez’s,#MuslimRevert on TikTok still has plenty of testimonials from women refusing to back down from their newfound faith. A TikTok revert who posts under the handle @lifewithlindsey111 responded in one video, “A lot of what I’m seeing in these Muslim communities and your comments on here is culture, not faith. Culture can vary, but Islam does not. So what I’m wearing, or someone telling me I have to put on hijab, like, this is cultural. There are billions of Muslims around the world and I’m telling you, not all of them wear hijab.”
The converts’ stories were part of a broader post-October 7 surge of religious enthusiasm online—a moment when faith, politics, and identity all seemed to collapse into one. Islam’s visibility on TikTok made it newly legible to a generation that had learned to express conviction through aesthetics, with prayer rugs and hijabs framed as visual signifiers of self-professed moral clarity.
The wider context for this Islamic conversion wave is a political landscape still haunted by the memory of 9/11. In an article titled “What the Left and Right Don’t Get About Islam,” philosophy professor Stephen Adubato described how Islam went from being viewed with suspicion to being embraced by progressives as the religion of the marginalized. In the 2000s, Islamophobia dominated American politics. By the 2010s, the left had made Muslims into symbols of pluralism and resistance. “It became cool to say you have a Muslim friend who is fasting for Ramadan,” Adubato recalled.That dynamic has created its own distortions. “At the end of the day, few liberals or conservatives seem to know very much about Islam,” Adubato writes, “They mostly regurgitate simplistic platitudes that they’ve heard on the news or in a TikTok reel, which are based on lines cherry-picked from the Qur’an out of context.” Islam, for both sides, became a screen onto which larger political fantasies were projected: to the right, a symbol of civilizational conflict; to the left, of moral purity.
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.
The last post from a young Muslim revert named Kelsey, who posts as the @yeehawmuzzy, is from January of this year. In it, she refers cryptically to “revert trauma” and alludes to tension between her Muslim and non-Muslim friends over her hijab. One young revert who posts under the handle @coffeewhOr just recently returned from a TikTok hiatus due to the Haram Police. “Being a revert is hard,” she said in a video announcing her return to the site, “Being a revert online is harder.”
Kayla, an American woman who came to Islam via pro-Palestinian activism, posts on TikTok and Instagram as @marxistcretin. Her feed is still mostly far-left politics and explainers defending Hamas and resisting Zionism. But even she has to contend with the Haram Police. “I don’t understand why Internet Muslims are coming for reverts’ throats,” she said in a Ramadan post, “for daring to be publicly honest about the fact that this is really, really tough. Especially when you are isolated.” Fasting during Ramadan as the only Muslim in your social circle can “feel like a massive burden,” she said.
Even if they still identify with the faith, most of the reverts’ former performative energy—the sense of participating in a world-historical struggle—appears to have turned inward to push back against online criticism from fellow believers. As Rice herself reflected, “The first two weeks or so is very welcoming … but after the initial red carpet rollout, it was as if there was nothing you could possibly do correctly.”
Others seem to merely drift away. @CoachItzy is a Las Vegas-based influencer who frequently posts about progressive causes alongside Shein hauls and fashion inspo. She initially converted to Islam during Ramadan, drawn to the strictness and discipline. She used to post in her hijab, but later dropped it and eventually decided on a whim to begin attending a Christian church she saw on a billboard ad. “It is so easy to get sucked up by the people and the lifestyle that you see in Vegas,” she said in a 2024 video. “Dressing modestly and wearing the hijab and all that, it’s kind of hard when you’re out in the clubs and living that sort of lifestyle.” It wasn’t an acrimonious breakup so much as a transition to a new era.
As one young woman told a researcher recently, “Islam is very trendy. If you’re on TikTok, it’s trendy to be religious. It’s crazy.” She meant it as an observation, but it could stand as an epitaph. The Gaza reverts who came to Islam are now deciding whether they joined a faith or a fandom. They must discover for themselves the difference between a social media following and following a religion whose very name means submission. Now that the feed is refreshing, their faith might just refresh too.
