The year is 2012, and London is in the sweaty grips of Olympic fever, the air is heavy with optimism, and the red and blue stripes of the Union Jacks hang innocuously on street corners. I go to my local corner shop, and while I exchange a few pre-inflation pennies for a drink, I ask the young South Asian man behind the counter whether he’s following any of the games. Sorting the shiny coins noisily into the compartments of his till, he absentmindedly scratches a patch of overly-gelled hair, ‘Nah Bruv. Illuminati innit,’ he says, with all the casual confidence of someone quoting a weather forecast. ‘Of course,’ I instinctively mumble as I grab my drink and make my exit.

Muslims in the West are no strangers to conspiracy theories. Many of us cut our political tooth on outlandish New World Order and Freemason narratives that defined the alternative politics of Muslims of the nineties and beyond. There are, of course, reasons for this. Successive western governments (most notably during the Bush and Clinton administrations in the US and under Blair’s Labour in the UK), pursued hawkish policies under the guise of democratising Muslim lands abroad, and anti-terror legislation aimed at curtailing and surveilling us at home. This only intensified following 9/11 and the farcical War on Terror which followed, culminating at the point in which we find ourselves now: where Islam is positioned as the ultimate enemy of Western civilisation. The writing regarding the often nefarious and double-speaking media and political establishments has long been on the wall for Muslims.

As a continually beleaguered community, we have always had ample reason to look beneath the hood of mainstream politics and probe the dominant narratives and policy positions that cause us serious harm. As the genocide in Gaza, the illegal war in Iraq before it, and the abominable media coverage of both demonstrate, Muslims are privy to a politics that much of the world is ignorant of.

Decades of being spun mistruths means that we have long become used to knowing that prevailing narratives are often, in fact, deliberate falsehoods. So it’s perhaps inevitable that the knowledge that the status quo is oftentimes deliberately manufactured might, for some, morph into a belief in full-blown conspiracy theories.

Situations like Palestine and Iraq tell us that governments initiate social panic through fabricated narratives in order to achieve their often sinister aims, manufacture consent from the public and sanitise their actions, employing the integral feature of conspiracy, the ‘folk devil,’ which is a person or group blamed for all societal problems and the object of media paranoia. For much of contemporary history, the ‘folk devil’ has fixated on the idea of the Muslim and Islam – Muslims are increasingly targeted in overt and implicit ways by political rhetoric, resulting in an alarming rise of far-right hatred and violence directed against Muslims under various guises – anti-immigrant, anti-shariah, or anti-any number of things Muslims have been labelled with in the media. 

That being said, many of the conspiracy theories Muslims have and continue to embrace, though consistent in their anti-establishment sentiment, veer on the improbable. Though sometimes innocent, and perhaps even something we look back at with nostalgia now, many of us are familiar with conspiracy theories – consider the claims that covert anti-Islamic messages were being recorded into popular music or those images of Coca-Cola spelt backwards to read ‘No Muhammad, No Makkah’ in Arabic that achieved remarkable virality across the world in the pre-smartphone era.

And we know that conspiracies provide narrative resources that give communities identity, purpose and belonging. Muslims did and do exhibit a readiness to accept the alternative, and a strong desire to invest in our own clandestine story. Historically, we can look back and see how these forged narratives amounted to a kind of cultural canon of our own – a kind of subaltern narrative for the dispossessed – in trying to decipher mainstream disdain for Islamic culture and practice, we turned to broader cultural symbols for the answers to some of our questions.

What resulted was a kind of blind feeling out for answers that grasped at increasingly unlikely targets as outlets for our political and cultural frustrations.

The young man at the shop’s economy of words referred to that shared cultural history, denoting a kind of expected shorthand; not only did he assume I would make full sense of his total disavowal of Olympic sports with a single noun phrase, he felt that two-worded sentence entirely expressive of his politics and world-view as a whole. What also belies this brief exchange is a kind of rudimentary and nebulous thinking, attached uncritically to any mainstream event or symbol.

This continued propensity for conspiracy speaks of a fire waiting to be ignited in the Muslim world. While many Muslims feel a deep dissonance between our religious beliefs and the political and cultural phenomena that surround us, without adequate religious resources or relevant and contemporary spiritual road maps to navigate these chasms, it’s all too easy to succumb to the downright fanciful and far-fetched. We risk falling into a kind of IKEA-style, DIY flat-pack politics which assumes anything endorsed by prevailing secular culture is inherently evil. This assures that, whatever the viral trend, there will be a parallel Muslim narrative that runs alongside it. 

Labubu must be shaytan, and Occam’s razor must never meet the Muslim’s chin. The expansive notion of organised sport, or <fill in the major cultural event blank here >, becomes as nefarious as elements of the political and cultural establishment, which Muslims may legitimately find disagreeable for religious and practical reasons. Muslim conspiracies continue to focus on superficial distractions that stop short of dealing with the cause or consequence of our issues. Though they are deemed ‘harmless,’ they are also counterproductive for this very reason – they do not lead to real-world understanding or change, and very often disarm us of the critical thinking necessary to gauge and combat them with viable solutions.

It is far easier to trade in symbolisms of the Olympics, supposedly coded corporate logos or commercial dolls than it is to understand the military-industrial complex, rampant capitalism and more economically and politically entrenched issues impacting our communities.

In the pre-Trumpian era, the Muslim affinity towards conspiracy narratives might have seemed remarkable. In 2025, it is simply anodyne. The death of monoculture, the rise of microcontent and the atomisation of information and media have led to a proliferation of alternate narratives and conspiracy thinking. This pluralisation of narratives – while sometimes leading to progressive change – has also led to the rise of anti-science and an anti-expert sentiment. This crisis of authority, coupled with a content boom in our digital, post-truth world, means legacy and mainstream media are often deemed the insidious mask of true-world events rather than a trustworthy source. And the troubling reality is that we know this is true in some cases. Fabricated stories about Muslims are as time-honoured as our counter-conspiracy thinking; see the Trojan Horse Scandal and Muslim fostering case – both revealed to be baseless, yet highly profiled in mainstream media.

Websites such as Reddit and 4Chan have put the average conspiracy theorist on equal footing with the previous media titans of our time. Many of us can count off a whole host of underbelly theories that have become our alternate headlines, ranging from the absurd to probable, all of which fit someone’s definition of a conspiracy theory. Pizzagate, the Epstein list, Covid-19, and Brigitte Macron’s contested gender are all conspiracy subjects on the more conservative end of an increasingly surreal scale, around which whole communities are built and in which conspiracy entrepreneurs are waiting like hawks to sell you a 5G vest. It is not only the shared belief in conspiracy that now unites Muslim communities with these often far-right communities in their niche digital alcove. As working-class communities become more disillusioned with establishment politics, there is an interesting convergence in the kind of beliefs held by groups that once stood on opposite sides. This includes the issue of Gaza, which has acted as a kind of political leveller, exposing those earnestly seeking the truth and those disingenuous and self-interested. It seems many of these digital truth seekers have identified common problems, though our proposed solutions are still wildly differing. 

So what is it about Muslims, primarily at home, but also abroad, that means we are so taken by the politics of conspiracy? And is it more about our social conditions than a crisis of faith? There are many traits and characteristics that experts identify in those susceptible to conspiracy thinking –  including low self-esteem, political alienation, unconventional or activist-style participation in politics, and a lack of agency. Crucially, all of these ring true for the ways Muslim communities find themselves disenfranchised in many Western countries across the globe. 

So, while the Muslim conspiracy might be a little more harmless than some of those gaining prominence in our content-obsessed world –  for example, that pigeons are a form of deep-state surveillance –  there are sobering reasons that underpin this cultural trend.

Could this propensity for conspiracy in many Muslim communities signal a broader search for genuine meaning and representation in a contemporary political and cultural landscape that feels designed to exclude or vilify us?

You could also argue that it is the result of being made into that ‘folk devil’ figure. If a conspiracy theory is effectively a disreputable version of events, then is it any wonder that they act as rallying calls to those deemed most disreputable? Ultimately, what is the difference between the mistruths that ensnare us as a community and the ones that are actually baseless fiction? When you know that what you see about yourself in the media is fabricated, is it any wonder that other realities appear as lies too – whether that’s Covid-19 or the genuine existence of pigeons. 

Being the perennial subject of media conspiracy theories means we have learned a thing or two about them over the last few generations. As a group whose very identity and existence is inherently and overtly politicised, there is no space for us except in activist, alternate politics – in fact, the very systems that govern our lives have been manufactured to ensure this remains the case.

When we are so comprehensively bound into a certain role by the establishment narrative, we are forced to take up our own pens – and could it be that this act of clinging to conspiracy, far-fetched though it might be, is sometimes the only way to regain any agency? 

But there’s also something to be said about the power dynamic between Muslim communities and Western governments, where the latter stands to gain from dismissing anything the former believes as ‘conspiracy’. The label of conspiracy then becomes a tool to further discredit already marginalised and disaffected communities and their valid concerns. We see this in the way that the seemingly conspiratorial political views of Muslims are portrayed as a lack of political sophistication, when in reality the opposite is often true. We are told to misbelieve the crimes we are seeing being committed before our very eyes in Gaza and buy into the ludicrous assertion that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Any deviation from this is treated as akin to the assertion that the Royal Family are, in fact, reptiles in human clothing. The boundaries between right and wrong are increasingly blurred when we look long and hard enough at how the truth itself has been rendered a political tool, written only by a select few.

Conspiracy theories matter because they have the potential to transcend the boundaries of mere belief and have a tangible impact on our lives – forming at once both the result and cause of our disenfranchisement.

Consider the growing anti-vaxx movement that we have seen become prevalent in Muslim societies (so much so that it was even one of the contributing factors of the high death rate amongst Muslims during the Covid pandemic) or the rise in homeschooling amongst Muslim communities in the West – both of which are arguably rooted in a mistrust of public health messages and state institutions.  Much of this concern has proven entirely valid, especially regarding how Muslims are treated by the same institutions whose advice we are expected to follow. As such, the end result of this systemic isolation is that our communities become less responsive to the systems that are meant to support us, and in turn more likely to surrender to alternative ideas that, on the surface, seem appealing precisely because they counter the status quo but actually do us material harm – like vaccine hesitancy.

Sometimes it seems as though Muslim conspiracy theories also simply come from a place of religious sincerity. Take the notion that Labubu dolls are shaytan, which gained momentum over the summer. At its heart, it was a respectable, if slightly outlandish, endeavour to reject rampant materialism and even potentially satanic symbols and iconography. Given the Islamic stance on idols, this is entirely justified, but the post-literate world we find ourselves in, where the prevalence of social media has eroded critical thinking and formal Islamic education, lends itself to hyper-fixation on viral trends such as Labubus whilst ignoring much more pressing issues of theology, spirituality and morality. 

As veterans in the contemporary world of conspiracy, the Muslim community has, as ever, much potential – particularly given our narrative resource is our sacred text. Islam, of course, encourages the kind of self-reflection and meditative pause that discourages investment in over simplistic, grandiose narratives for the sake of either delusion, inertia or self-aggrandisement. A richer, more meaningful engagement with our faith, rather than the torrid whims of the algorithm, is a key component of our religious and political engagement. 

Rather than double down on those hyperbolic theories which give us a sense of collective delusion, Muslim communities need to refocus our efforts on real community building offline, with honourable mention to those civic organisations such as The Muslim Vote, as well as various other movements and community organisations we see burgeoning across Muslim spaces. We have the opportunity to stop moulding our narratives within the narrow, paranoid spaces that mainstream culture allows, and to write ourselves, and our stories whole and untethered – otherwise we will always just be in opposition to the illuminati, innit.