#NotInMyName Muslims Against Islamic State

Young Muslims in the UK have taken to using the hashtag #NotInMyName to speak out against the actions of ISIS, arguing that their claims to be acting in the name of Islam are false.

The movement was started by East London-based group Active Change Foundation, which used twitter and YouTube to distance the actions of Muslims from the actions of extremists like ISIS.

Such twitter campaigns are used to unite members of a group to speak out against those who abuse its message or give false impressions, as well as to disavow people who view the hashtag of assumptions they might have held about a given group. The Huffington Post recently ran a series of hashtags for the LGBT+ communityto encourage people to post pictures of themselves, to challenge stereotypes of what being LGBT+ looked like along the same vein.

These hashtags, while serving different purposes and communities, do have a commonality in their mission – and that is, to defend the groups who use them. While these hashtags unite people in the purpose of positively defining and demarcating the group, in this case Muslims, they are reactive to assumptions that all Muslims are united in purpose with ISIS in some way, which is an incorrect and insidious connection to make. Of interested to HSPS, PPE, and Arch and Anth applicants is the phenomenon of minority groups having to distance themselves from extremist acts in a way that the majority do not, such asDuggan’s discussion of ‘homonormativity’ in the case of sexual and gender minorities and Cobb’s discussion of respectability politicsin the case of ethnic minorities.