A video showing a man dressed in a thobe — a long, ankle-length robe — accompany a couple of women to a gym, has gone viral on the internet.
The claim: The video, which shows the man removing hijabs and niqabs that the women were wearing, has gone viral with the following text:
"Sheikh was asked, why are you removing the hijab of your wives? Sheikh Saheb replied- I am not a Convert, I am an Original Sheikh and This is My Personal Choice. (sic)"
An archived version of this post can be seen here.
(Source: X (formerly Twitter)/Screenshot)
How did we find out the truth?: We noticed that in one part of the video, the background carried the words 'Sky Fit Academia'.
There is a large sign reading 'Sky Fit Academia' in the background.
(Source: Facebook/Altered by The Quint)
Taking a cue from this, we used this as keywords and found that 'Sky Fit Academias' is the name of a chain of gyms in Brazil.
Using the name of the gym, coupled with "sheikh" as a keywords, we conducted another search.
The source of the video: This led us to their TikTok account, which we accessed using a VPN (virtual private network), as the platform is banned in India.
The account carried a video showing the same man, and a screenshot of what appeared to be a news headline in Portuguese which read "Sheik compra academia do Lucas Lucco e leva pretendente para conhecer."
[Translation: Sheik buys Lucas Lucco's gym and takes his suitor to meet him.]
The same person was seen in both videos.
(Source: Facebook/TikTok/Altered by The Quint)
Next, we ran a Google search using the headline as our search term, which led us to an Instagram account called 'Sheik do Tocantins'.
This account had shared the viral video on 16 April, with the hashtag '#meme".
We saw that this account had shared several videos of this 'Sheik' from Brazil's Tocantins, which showed the man going to different places and were shared with hashtags mentioning 'humor'.
His Facebook page identifies him as a 'video creator', indicating that the person creates staged videos.
The page's introduction mentioned that it was a 'video creator'.
(Source: Facebook/Altered by The Quint)
The Quint has contacted the creator for their inputs and will update this report if a response is received.
Conclusion: A Brazilian content creator's video has gone viral with the false claim that it shows a sheikh taking his wives to the gym.
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