For Muslims, Social Media Debate on Extremism Is Reflected in Dueling Hashtags
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Version 0 of 1. LONDON — With concerns growing in the West about the recruitment of young people by extremist Islamic groups, President Obama brought new attention last week to Muslims who have condemned the radical movement when he singled out a British group for praise in his speech at the United Nations. The group, the Active Change Foundation, a community organization in East London, began a campaign this month built around the Twitter hashtag #notinmyname, which has denounced the beheading of the British aid worker David Haines and other brutal acts committed by the radical group Islamic State. The hashtag has been tweeted tens of thousands of times, and a YouTube video promoting the campaign has more than 200,000 views. But the campaign has spawned a satirical reaction from Muslims who say it presumes that they are somehow collectively responsible for Islamic extremism. Using the hashtag #Muslimapologies, they have tweeted mock apologies for advances by Muslims in the fields of mathematics and medicine, as well as for creations like coffee, shampoo, cameras and chess. While the tweets are sarcastic and playful, they underline frustration among some Muslims with Western misperceptions of Islam. The hashtag #Muslimapologies at one point topped the trending list on Twitter in Britain. “Sorry for Algebra #Muslimapologies,” tweeted @AnaziNasser, beneath a picture of the Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, whose ninth-century treatise, Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah, laid the foundation of algebra. Another, @wanderd0gs, wrote: “I’m sorry for inventing surgery, coffee, universities, algebra, hospitals, toothbrushes, vaccinations, numbers, & the sort.” Another Twitter user, @yafavoritearab, responded to #notinmyname: “Don’t expect me to apologize for ISIS. I actually deserve an apology for your narrow-minded stereotype of me.” The Not In My Name campaign was not intended as an apology for Islam, its supporters say, but rather to express outrage over murders and other violence committed by groups like the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Western countries have grappled with trying to prevent young people from joining radical Muslim forces, fearing in part that the recruits might bring their training and commitment to violent jihad back home. In his speech at the United Nations on Wednesday, Mr. Obama said more effort had to be made to expose, confront and refute the ideology of radical groups. “Look at the young British Muslims,” he said, “who responded to terrorist propaganda by starting the Not in My Name campaign, declaring, ‘ISIL is hiding behind a false Islam.’ ” Saying that he was speaking directly to “young people across the Muslim world,” Mr. Obama added: “You come from a great tradition that stands for education, not ignorance; innovation, not destruction; the dignity of life, not murder. Those who call you away from this path are betraying this tradition, not defending it.” The Not In My Name campaign is among a number of efforts by British Muslims to speak out against the Islamic State, which analysts estimate has attracted about 500 British fighters. Recently, in an open letter, more than 100 imams called the militant group “un-Islamic” and pleaded for the release of Alan Henning, a British hostage whom militants have threatened to behead. They said that Mr. Henning, a cabdriver who had volunteered to deliver humanitarian aid in Syria, had tried to help Muslims and deserved to live. In the last week, thousands of Muslims in sympathy with the Not In My Name campaign, from mosques in places like France, Germany and Norway, held demonstrations to condemn the Islamic State’s ideology and actions. The hashtag #notinmyname is not new. It was a prominent anti-Iraq war slogan in 2003, and many Israelis used #notinmyname in the summer to condemn the war in Gaza. Hanif Qadir, founder of the Active Change Foundation and a former jihadist, said he wanted to spread the word that the Islamic State does not represent Islam. “Young British Muslims are sick and tired of the hate-filled propaganda the terrorists ISIS and their supporters churn out on social media,” Mr. Qadir said in an email. “They are angry that the criminals are using the platforms to radicalize young people and spread their poisonous words of violence in the name of Islam.” Islamic State militants, he said, “do not practice the true teachings of Islam: peace, mercy and compassion. They are the enemy of all mankind.” The Islamic State has proved adept at using social media to spread its message. The group has started new Twitter and YouTube accounts as soon as old ones are suspended, and it has used parts of the hit video game Grand Theft Auto to radicalize and recruit young Muslims. The militants also latch on to trending hashtags, like one used for the Scottish independence referendum, to get wide distribution of their material. Mehreen Faruqi, a Pakistan-born Australian politician, asked in an opinion article whether attempts by Muslims to dissociate themselves from the Islamic State might “entrench the opposite view.” Writing in The Guardian, she said that expecting apologies from Muslims implied that they were homogeneous and not truly accepted as part of Western society. Jaesa Rahmannialdy, a graduate student in Manchester who tweeted in support of the Not In My Name campaign, disagreed. “If Muslims don’t care enough to speak out against people slandering their religion, then their silence says more than enough,” he said in an interview. “To wash your hands of the matter and say they are not ‘real’ Muslims is grossly irresponsible, immature and, frankly, lazy.” |