Should Qaf partner with @simonsayssquat? The review starts with how Muslims see him: who hosts him, who criticises him, where he stands on the questions that divide Muslims, and how reliable his religious content is. Reach, commercial conflicts and Swedish press risk come after that.
Muslims who know him like him. Large dawah channels keep hosting him, no scholar or creator has publicly criticised him, and about 0.2% of the 7,741 comments sampled are hostile. On the few questions he rules on, he leans toward the Madinah-trained, Salafi-leaning line: Mawlid is bid'ah, music is out, and Muslims should ideally leave the West. Those videos barely travelled. The problems are commercial. A typical post now reaches about 3,000 people. His feed is currently a funnel for Takallam, an AI app that teaches Quranic Arabic to the users Qaf is after, and none of his promotions carry an ad label. His 2024–25 "Sunnah weight-loss" marketing also makes loose religious claims, which a brand built on citations shouldn't stand next to. Clear the Takallam question first, then test two or three scripted posts that carry a paid-partnership label and are paid per view.
A Swedish convert, born 1995, who was an atheist hip-hop producer. He took his shahada in 2017, studied Arabic in Cairo in 2018 and moved to Dubai around late 2021 on a scholarship. There he finished an Arabic programme and says he is still doing a bachelor's in Islamic studies. He built his following in 2021–22 by signing the Quran in Arabic sign language and answering questions about his tattoos. From 2023 to mid-2026 he sold "Stronger Muslim" / "Sunnah Weightloss" fitness coaching. Since August 2026 his feed has been Arabic-learning content that leads to the Takallam app.
Warmly, with little depth of discussion. Towards Eternity (3.95M subscribers) ran his conversion story in June 2026: 1.22M views and no critical comments in about 400 sampled. Omar Hisham Al Arabi published their sign-language Quran collaboration, and Freshly Grounded, the Ansari Podcast and Chai With My Bhai have all hosted him. We found no refutation video, forum thread or scholar's criticism. The pushback that does exist comes from scattered commenters. Some born Muslims tire of "revert complaint" videos, and a small group accused him of using religion to sell coaching.
Not as a person, but some of his positions are. He never discusses creed disputes, madhhab, Sufism or Shia Islam. Where he does take sides, it is the Salafi-leaning side:
Most of these reached a few hundred to a few thousand people. The exception is a 2.5M-view skit that calls folding the prayer mat a bid'ah. Excluding his tattoo videos, fault-line content is about 7% of his lifetime views.
The audience fits. His followers are English-speaking, non-Arab Muslims and converts who want to understand the Quran and their prayers.
He is comfortable with AI. He promoted Tarteel with a discount code in 2023, he promotes Takallam now, and he has shown how he uses ChatGPT to pick daily duas.
The deal is weak. Reach is low, the Takallam relationship is unexplained, and he often improvises word meanings and tafsir, which native speakers then correct in his comments. Any Qaf spot has to put Qaf's sourced answer on screen, not his own explanation.
His network is mainstream Sunni dawah and Muslim-entrepreneur media. His religious references point to Madinah-trained teachers. He has no feuds, and he doesn't lean on polemicists.
| Who | Where they sit | Link to him | What it signals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Towards Eternity | Large mainstream dawah channel, 3.95M subscribers, subtitled in 12 languages | Conversion-story interview, Jun 2026, 1.22M views | His biggest recent exposure. The comments are warm, but only 2–3 of about 400 name him, so it built little recall for him personally. |
| Omar Hisham Al Arabi | Mainstream reciter, 3.8M subscribers | Published Simon's sign-language Quran videos in 2021 (1.4M views on one Short) | His most trusted religious work. Families of deaf Muslims thanked him. |
| LaunchGood | Global Muslim crowdfunding platform | Featured his sign-language Surah ar-Rahman | Accepted by mainstream Muslim civil society. |
| Freshly Grounded | UK-founded Muslim entrepreneur podcast | Hosted him in #320 (May 2023) and #422 (Jan 2026) | They also hosted you in #435. That is a warm route for an introduction. |
| The Ansari Podcast | Centrist American Muslim show whose guests include Omar Suleiman and Suhaib Webb | Episode 76, Jan 2024 | Accepted outside convert and Salafi circles. |
| Chai With My Bhai | "Righteous & Rich" halal-business scene (Imran ibn Mansur) | Case study on "monetising a following", Feb 2024 | Some viewers called it "prosperity dawah". |
| Canyon Mimbs Show | US convert podcast, 58K subscribers | Sep 2025 episode, about 2.2K views | Source of his hardest hijrah quotes (see Fault lines). |
| Dr Abdullah as-Sueidi | Swedish convert with MA and PhD from the Islamic University of Madinah, lectures at the Prophet's Mosque | Simon says a "famous Swedish revert" lecturer there connected him to his Dubai scholarship (2022 podcast) | Places him in the Madinah-trained current. The identification is ours, from his description. |
| @medinastudenten (Moosa Assal) | Swedish Madinah student. Expressen called him a "salafist influencer" in 2022; others dispute that label. | Thanked in the credits of two 2021 sign-language videos | A thank-you credit, not an affiliation. It would only matter if Swedish press went looking. |
| Tim Humble, AMAU Academy, Abdurrahman Hassan | UK teachers, mostly Madinah-trained | The only teachers he names. He ran a discount-code ad for AMAU in Dec 2022. | Consistent with the rest: mainstream, Salafi-leaning, not polemical. |
Goodwill has held up: praise on his non-sales videos has stayed between about 35% and 50% of comments every year. His reach has not held up, and in the coaching years most comments on sales posts were keyword replies rather than conversation.
Surah al-Qadr and Ayat al-Kursi in sign language (2.0M and 1.8M views). A reply explaining that tattoos from before Islam are forgiven (4.9M, top comment "your arabic accent is 100% masha allah", 17.6K likes). Praise came in Arabic, Somali, Malay and English. His Somali-tagged posts had a median of 178K views.
A video on lonely deaths in Sweden (1.8M) landed well. A video on Sweden's new honour-oppression law (1.2M) got the law wrong, and its comments said so (see Sweden). A skit calling it bid'ah to fold the prayer-mat corner (2.5M) left viewers asking "so do we fold it or not" (4.3K likes) and "I NEED SOURCE". His move to the UAE (348K) drew du'as, plus some doubts about Dubai.
Mawlid-is-bid'ah video (317 views), Palestine talk (401 views), "How I learned Arabic in 6 months" (16K, his best YouTube video), Freshly Grounded #320, and a discount-code promo for Tarteel.
On Chai With My Bhai he told the "Imam Ahmad and the baker" story as authentic. Later, in the comments, he wrote: "there are is no authentic origin of this story. This was a mistake from my side." He also rebuked Muslims who praised Aaron Bushnell, and said the Prophet couldn't pray for his parents (13.9K).
More than half his TikToks were sales pitches ("Comment FUEL", "DM me COACH"). His biggest post since October 2022 (1.4M) opens with "Real Muslim should not have big bellies" and ends in a coaching offer. On sales posts, 58–73% of comments are one-word keyword replies. The hijrah remarks came this year too, but in videos with a few thousand views.
He posted no TikToks between early January and late July. In June came the Towards Eternity interview (1.22M views). From 29 July his posts are Arabic word lessons that lead to Takallam. In September he posted election videos (122K and 151K). His posts on the roots of Arabic words (up to 206K views) draw Arab viewers' praise, along with corrections ("Nafs isn't soul").
The reach column matters as much as the position. His strongest sectarian statements sit in videos that few people saw.
| Issue | His position | Pleases | Alienates | Reach |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bid'ah, Mawlid | "I don't celebrate the prophet's birthday… it was not done by… the companions… which makes it an innovation" (video). His prayer-mat skit ends on "every innovation is misguidance… in the Hellfire" (TikTok). He calls birthdays and Valentine's Day pagan. | Salafi, Gulf-trained dawah audiences | Sufi and traditionalist Muslims: South Asian Barelvi, Turkish, Indonesian and Malaysian, North and West African | 317 · 2.5M · ~4K |
| The Prophet's parents | "The Prophet… couldn't make Dua for his parents because they were disbelievers" (TikTok). This is the most sect-coded line in his whole catalogue. | Athari and Salafi | Barelvi, Sufi and many Ash'ari Muslims, who hold that the Prophet's parents are saved | 13.9K |
| Sects | Answers "Sunni or Shia?" with the 73-sects hadith: only the group on "what I and my companions are upon" is saved (Swedish TikTok). He never names Shia. | Sunni viewers | Shia viewers (few in his audience) | 8.7K |
| Creed, madhhab, Sufism, moon sighting | Silent. No statements on Allah's attributes, Ash'ari vs Athari, tawassul, graves, madhhabs (he describes, never prescribes), Shia or Eid dates. On the disputed Ashura date he says fast both days. | Everyone | No one | — |
| Music | Says the industry is "a movement for shaytan" and claims he saw "Satanic rituals" as a producer. Calls nasheeds a "grey area". He practises what he says: no named music tracks on TikTok since Nov 2024. | Practising and conservative Muslims | Liberal Muslims, mildly | 264K |
| Gender | Community groups segregated "no mix between brothers and sisters". Women clients never shown on camera (checked on YouTube). No handshakes with the opposite sex. Traditional roles. He coaches women one-to-one, and a sister's question about a female coach went unanswered. | Conservative Western Muslims | Progressive Muslims. Strict viewers may question a male coach in private chat with women. | low |
| Hijrah and living in the West | "We should not live in non-Muslim countries… people hate it" (podcast). He allows exceptions: dawah, healthcare, education, migrants supporting family. His sharpest line targets families who moved West: their "children are now changing gender homosexual… what are you going to say in front of Allah" (48:31). Elsewhere: "every single Muslim should make hijra, like absolutely should" (video). | Hijrah-minded converts, Gulf-resident Muslims | Settled second- and third-generation Western Muslims, a large share of Qaf's users | 2.2K · 910 |
| Voting in the West | Sept 2026: "vi svenska muslimer, vi är här för att stanna. Så rösta rätt" ("we Swedish Muslims are here to stay, so vote right"). The target is clearly SD. He gives no religious argument for voting, and he has lived in Dubai since about 2021. | Politically engaged Swedish and European Muslims | Quietists who reject voting (none objected in the comments). Open to charges that it contradicts his hijrah stance. | 122K · 151K |
| Palestine | Sympathetic but posts little about it and frames it as personal reform: "genocide", "propaganda from Israel", "fix yourself first, make dua". Never mentions Hamas or boycotts. Some Gaza posts sit next to coaching offers. He ignored the most-liked comment asking him to boycott IKEA. | Quietist viewers | Activists, mildly | 401 · 16K |
| UAE and the Gulf | Calls the Gulf states "probably the best place to be on earth". Told viewers to trust "government sources" during the Iran war. Answered a Yemen jab by pointing at Sweden's arms sales. Called fears that simply being gay brings the death penalty in the UAE a "misconception". | Gulf-resident and pro-Gulf Muslims | Muslims critical of the UAE over Yemen, Sudan and normalisation | ~3K |
| Tattoos | Tattoos are haram. Sins before Islam are wiped out. Scholars don't require painful removal. He says he'll remove his when it can be done painlessly. | Broad consensus. Defenders far outnumber removal advocates in the comments. | Very strict viewers | ~6.8M |
| Converts vs born Muslims | Attacks the "haram police", favours private advice, and regrets his own early "extreme" phase | Converts, Muslims tired of harshness | Some born Muslims ("stop complaining") | 2.7K |
He is a fitness and lifestyle creator who studies Islam, not a teacher of religious knowledge. He is honest about that. The weak spot is how he uses texts: when religion sells a product, the claims stretch.
He sold a 16-week mentorship "based on the Quran and the Sunnah" and tied specific results to single sunnah practices. He read Quran 16:43 ("ask the people of knowledge"), a verse traditionally about scholars of revelation, as an order to buy accountability coaching. He presented istighfar as a way to "get anything you want… a good looking body, money, or even a new spouse", then told viewers to comment "system" to get his offer. On YouTube these videos got only a few hundred views each. The TikTok hooks travelled much further.
Since August 2026 he has dropped the coaching message: his bio no longer mentions it, and his posts are Arabic lessons. Comments accusing him of "selling religion" appear only in 2023–25.
Untested. None of his 2026 TikToks says "AI". The app is named once, in speech, and not a single comment mentions Takallam, AI or advertising. The only AI comments are three low-engagement ones (one from a self-described native Arab) saying ChatGPT translates Arabic well now. A Qaf post that says "AI" openly would be the first real test.
The wider community is split. Egypt's Dar al-Ifta ruled in Dec 2025 that relying on AI apps for fatwas is impermissible, while other AI use is permissible in principle. IslamQA allows AI only as a search tool to find references that you then check. MuslimMatters backs tools that cite sources, as "a starting point, not an authority". A FAccT 2025 study found that Muslims who said they distrust AI still preferred AI answers in 81% of blind comparisons. The framing that works across his Salafi-leaning and mainstream viewers: a research tool that shows its sources, not a mufti.
The audience fits, but his current reach is a small fraction of his follower counts. A typical post reaches about 0.6% of his TikTok followers.
Low risk. No agency, researcher or newspaper names him. Three items could surface if someone went looking.
The official Swedish report on the 2022–23 LVU social-services disinformation campaign (MPF/FHS, 2023) does not mention him. Nor does MPF's 2026 election report, and neither do Samnytt, Doku, Document or Flashback. His only LVU video (52K views) was cautious: "we cannot be 100% sure".
In a 1.2M-view TikTok he read out a public-health list of signs of honour oppression as if they were crimes: "if you as a parent do any of these things… you can be… sentenced to one to six years". The law requires repeated criminal acts. He did condemn honour crimes in the same video. The top comment reads "It's a great law" (5.2K likes).
"Rösta rätt!" (vote right): an anti-SD call with no party named. It came in the same week SVT reported unnamed Muslim influencers urging people not to vote SD. He says nationalists called him a "landsförrädare" (traitor). A Qaf post next to these would draw the same people into his comments.
Corpus. We covered every public TikTok (1,008) and every long YouTube video (58) on his channels, plus five long interviews on other channels. 1,050 of the 1,066 videos have transcripts: TikTok and YouTube captions, plus a local Whisper transcription of 558 TikToks that had no captions (mostly 2021–23), with Somali clips re-run as Somali. We also sampled 7,741 comments (TikTok's public comment API, top ≤200 per video with no replies; YouTube via yt-dlp) and web sources in English, Swedish and Arabic.
Checks. 11 research lenses produced 232 findings. Independent checkers reopened the sources for the 180 findings that mattered: 94 were confirmed as written and 86 were corrected. The 36 most decision-relevant claims then went to two skeptics each, one checking the evidence and one looking for fairness and context. One claim was toned down (Takallam's "free" wording), and four were reworded. A final pass looked for gaps and filled most of them: the prayer-mat video, the Somali clips and his AI record.
Limits.