Muslim boy, Khaby Lame, becomes world’s most followed TikToker

Khaby Lame, a 22-year-old Senegalese, has become the most followed TikToker in the world with a total of 143.2 million followers on the platform.

Lame, a devout Muslim and Hafez, currently lives in Italy. He moved with his family to Italy when he was little.

The esteemed title, Hafez, is a title ascribed to someone who can recite the entire Quran offhand.

Although growing up in poverty and living in social housing with his parents, Lame says he owes everything he has to his roots.

“Public housing is a place to which I owe everything,” Lame told Olhar Digital last year. “They taught me education and allowed me to cultivate many bonds.”

In 2020, Lame was working as a machine operator at a factory in Turin, northern Italy. As the pandemic swept through the country, Lame was laid off.

He told Forbes that making Tik Tok videos was a way of fighting the boredom of being unemployed during the lockdown.

“The pandemic had just started, and I was bored with a lot of time on my hands so I started making videos on TikTok,” he said.

Lame began making videos in which he would mock ‘life-hack’ videos made by other users, acting out simple ways to do what they made complicated, and topping it off with a wide-eyed stare or a shrug.

“I came up with the idea because I was seeing these videos circulating, and I liked the idea of bringing some simplicity to it,” Lame said to CNN last year, “I thought of a way to reach as many people as possible. And the best way was not to speak.”

In his more recent videos, Lame has continued to stick to comedy but has broadened his methods by introducing both friends and costumes into his vids.

“You’re number one,” one fan wrote, while another said: “You did it, you passed Charli.”

Others referred to Lame as the “new king of TikTok,” with some expressing how he has inspired them to create content.