I’ve been born and raised Muslim my whole life and I’m also a young man (early 20s) and I must say that I really do miss that community aspect of the mainstream Muslim community. I left the salafi stuff years ago around 2021 , but 2020 was the year when everything started changing direction into where I will be today. Not to get into my story and to stay on topic , I must say that this journey —learning about Islam and no longer being a salafi and learning a different version of Islam that is richer , sensible and beautiful , I have to say that it’s also been very isolating and very lonely and the community that mainstream Muslims have and capitalize on (especially the salafi ones) is very enticing. Even though I no longer agree with salafiyyah, I have to say that the community aspect is what still has me longing for the Muslim community in spite of its toxicity and problems. I think salafiyyah and even non-salafi but neo-conservative versions of Islam that are also very widespread in the mainstream Muslim space capitalize on this. This sense of ummah and the need of belonging to a people is what I beleive is almost innate in human beings to find a people for them (at least in my development stage I find this to be so common, people wan to join a community be a part of something). I also find that the cringe fringe off the hinge people tend to be active in Muslim communities and probably this is why so much of the toxicity of community is so amplified but do correct me and add on any other insights.

I recently went down memory lane and started to look up a number of the Muslim influencers I used to follow in 2020 and I must say that I am really surprised what happened to many of them. Most of these people were not salafi but became salafi afterwards , some of them just deleted all social media , others continued with they content but tried to appear more “Muslim” ish (girls who didn’t wear hijab now wearing it), some have secularized their pages more (to where they literally don’t even mention they are Muslim and have taken off their actual names from their socials) and others really went in the deep end of salafism which saddened me. But as I was scrolling through this one who became a salafi, I saw a video he did comparing his past self to his new self and his experience in a « Muslim country » and having this whole romanticism of making Hijra (those types) and glorifying KSA among other problematic countries, and I realized that many of these young people drawn to salafiyyah (who were not salafi before) did not fit in, were underdogs , unassimilated , in general they often were uprooted individuals who were somewhat unassimilated within their environment or felt some form of rejection by the wider culture; which is something I think can also, alongside salafiyyah, explain the hyper conservatism in a number (not all) of mainstream Muslims.