Ever wondered about turning Muslim boys into real men? This is what the Badr Club offers to do with gym-prayer-horse-riding-shooting retreats so participants can earn a ‘second wife’ and enter the ‘six-figures’ lifestyle.

In my research The Diaspora Strikes Back, I observe among other things how decades of racism and islamophobia, combined with modernity’s atomisation of communities and a thick layer of colonial trauma has rendered a lot of Western Muslim men over-dependent and unprepared materially, intellectually and psychologically to deal with a society that breaks them even further – more on that further below. So, when I saw the advert for the Badr Club, I got PUMPED.

Their video is a gripping piece of modern marketing, dynamically filmed and edited, up to action movie standards. Furtive images of Dubai, a gym, jet-skis, horse-riding, archery, firearms and powerful automobiles are accompanied by a deep voice speaking in short impactful sentences with a lovely London street twist.

That same voice promises a journey to seek ‘Focus, Principles, Sincerity, Strength, Honesty and Knowledge’ – such important values to start with – and carries on a crescendo until the punchline: ‘it is time for boys to become men.’ I am in awe. I have been craving for Muslims to organise a programme for young boys to acquire a set of skills that would make them autonomous, independent, and ready to become the best husbands and fathers – isn’t that the definition of adulthood anyways? They advertise taking care of ‘Physical and Mental Health, Relationships, Finances and most importantly Faith’ – sign me in!

Then hits the cognitive dissonance: how Dubai, jet skis, firearms, Victoria’s Secret or a Bentley can be markers of manliness let alone adulthood, or ‘Victory’? Maybe they can see how luxury items relate to ‘Honesty and Knowledge’ – but if knowledge leads you to choose a car as unreliable as a Bentley, I have questions. I want to learn life skills. In many parts of the world, a man is valued upon his ability to fix things: to build a house, hunt, grow plants and raise cattle rather than owning a car or earning ‘six-figures’ – where is your woodworks course? Picture that: in the 1980s’ England, Muslim men, even those with no financial limitations, would choose a Toyota over anything else because reliability was favoured over prestige (which comes from the Latin praestigium, illusion).

On their website, for £313 (roughly a month’s universal credit) you can participate to ‘Operation Six Figures’ or ‘Operation Second Wife’ – which I don’t think they mean for divorcees. While ‘six figures’ is a reasonable goal in Pakistani Rupees, I worry that they might be talking Sterling – something I can’t even imagine reaching while doing three jobs at the same time including two businesses, 7 days a week (researcher, videographer and car detailer). Retreats are at an extra cost. What about the many boys living with their parents in council estates, will they be excluded from becoming men? 

I assume their intentions are good but can’t overlook how the ‘six-figures’ rhetoric looms as an eerie reminder of the same vocabulary employed by get-rich-quick schemes such as the defunct Muslim Entrepreneur Network. Organising meetings in the Barking mosque, the M.E.N (isn’t that ironic?) promised freedom and independence in the shape of a ‘halal investment’ to a crowd of vulnerable uncles, single parents and council estate youngsters, and instead ate whole life savings away – and led some of the founders to be arrested for fraud. Many initiatives too, fall into the trap of uncritically copy-pasting Western models to the point of harm: many Muslim charities like to copy British colonial officers posing with locals.

I don’t consider myself in need of what the club has to offer. I hold a powerboat license, a motorsports license, I regularly shoot firearms for competition in the UK, I am in a financially stable situation, I am happily married and had my fair share of relationships (especially since I wasn’t born Muslim). But I have to say to anyone seeking improvement through these experiences: none of these helped me better my character. What helped me grow were experiences such as:

• Falling out of friendship and mending friendships,
• Facing the rejection from my family and mending relations with my family,
• Surviving 5 years of abusive marriage, a divorce, 5 years of depression and suicidal thoughts,
• Migrating to a foreign country with no money,
• Surviving isolation in a country where a majority of Muslims rejected me for being Polish,
• Becoming jobless and homeless in that same country where I had no friends nor family,

As a result, I consider the very fact that I’m still alive as success.

In Young Muslim Change-Makers, I describe how the most brilliant people I have ever met are often those who overcame some of the most painful hardships: losing a relative, becoming seriously ill, becoming a single parent, living in poverty, etc. Therefore, I am pressed to ask: is the Badr Club offering anything challenging? On their website, I seek in vain the Prophetic values that modernity has robbed from many: Respect, Commitment, Critical Thinking, Resilience, or even the virtue most admired by Allah: Patience. You want mental strength and jetskiing? Instead of Dubai, try jetskiing in the British Solent in the Winter. Prophets were not made in holiday clubs. 

You talk about mental health? Where are clinical psychologists on your retreats? Without ihsaan (excellence), it is tantamount to parachuting people on the middle of a climb to the Everest without equipment, without training and without a map. Relationships and wealth are tests; it is one thing to obtain them, and a whole different other to handle them.

Many Western Muslims welcome with open arms this aesthetic idea of manliness as a response to ‘the war on masculinity’ waged by ‘feminism’ or ‘wokeism.’ Ironically, many of these self-proclaimed adversaries of ‘feminism’ justify depleting their hard-earned savings for the sole purpose of… pleasing women. True story: a friend of mine got rejected for marriage because the other party wanted someone who drives a Mercedes (again, poor automobile standards). Who is really free from the Matrix, then?

In my fieldwork, I have met many of these enhardened men who, at 40, still rely on their mum to feed them. While they are flexing their steroid-injected muscles, bank-interest-financed supercars and designer clothes sourced on Aliexpress, many can’t replace a lightbulb in their own houses –thank God, there’s always a DIY uncle in the family. Chivalry? I call these Passive Pashas™. When gender identity becomes reduced to consumerist choices, when the size of one’s wallet has become a personality trait, it is clear it was never a simple a gender problem but a conformity one – dare I say a colonial one.

The Badr Club wants to feed men the matricial Red Pill but forgets that our neoliberal society has rendered us colour-blind: ‘six figures’ looks sadly blue to me. Believing that financial excess will deliver us from evil is the credo of homo oeconomicus: obey, consume and reproduce. (Watch They Live by John Carpenter, 1988) Men have become ‘weak’ not because they have been robbed of their manliness but because dominant systems of oppression have robbed us all of our time, our agency, our ethics, morals, our faith and our humanity. Religion has become figuring on the next Imperial Honours list and buying a Nike Prayer mat made of Uyghur Muslim blood. ‘High value men’ want to be served and not to be in service anymore. Chivalry died when people stopped supporting each other and started looking up to their masters and the minstrels.

I want to look with compassion at people who grew up deprived of financial stability, media visibility and political representation and are at the same time constantly bombarded with images of luxurious lifestyles. Is it that surprising to see these frustrations create the Badr Club or other aberrations such as power-hungry elite clubs like the Muppies or the Concordia Forum (Kanjwal 2018)? The Badr Club can give participants new ideas, a new vocabulary perhaps, friends definitely, but no retreat or coaching can be a substitute to first-hand experiences and advice from people who have battled through life.

More often than not, whatever we need to grow as a person is right in front of us and at no cost, if only this modern world could let us be satisfied with it. My ultimate question is: when will we see a retreat that will allow men to better understand society and themselves in order to become not just men but true khilafa (stewards)? So Badr Club, come on guys, you can do better than this.

Author’s bio

William Barylo is a Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Warwick working on Muslim lived experiences in Europe and North America, author of Young Muslim Change-Makers, director of the documentary Polish Muslims and currently working on the action-research project The Diaspora Strikes Back which has been awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. More on:  williambarylo.com.