For Muslims, social media debate on extremism is reflected in dueling hashtags

Rasa - With concerns growing in the West about the recruitment of young people by terrorist groups, some Muslims are condemning the radical movement by their innovative actions.

News ID: 1259

Date: 28 September 2014 - 23:07

RNA - 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.

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.

“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.

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.

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