When Hamza wasn’t obsessing over the choices of “westernised” Muslim women, he was fixated on other baseless ideas he had encountered online, ranging from who “really” controlled the financial system to British universities encouraging and paying for people to have abortions. What she didn’t realise was the amount he had been watching and the effect they would have on him. When she initially saw the videos on his phone, he told her that friends had sent them to him via WhatsApp or that he’d seen them in his recommendations and clicked on them out of curiosity. Khan became aware that Hamza (not his real name) was caught up in this world in the last year of their relationship. “Even when we would spend time together, I’d catch him watching YouTube videos about the evils of feminism on his phone.” “All he wanted to do was talk about how modern women didn’t have Islamic values any more,” said Khan. Even the smallest problems - a restaurant reservation falling through or being late to a date because of heavy traffic - would escalate into shouting matches, often underpinned by Hamza’s increasingly reactionary view of what male and female gender roles should be. They weren’t the run-of-the-mill disagreements one might expect in any relationship. “The last few months of our relationship were just filled with unwinnable arguments,” Khan said. That ugly scene was the culmination of a year of arguments, tearful nights and attempts by Khan to come to terms with Hamza’s rapidly changing personality. Her eyes filled with tears as she recalled walking to Edgware Road underground station, the man she had thought was the love of her life yelling at her to come back and telling her that she would be nothing without him. Samayya Khan vividly remembers the moment when, in September, she ended her relationship with Hamza.
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