You Know You’ve reached peak Islamophobia when a presidential candidate says he’d be uncomfortable with a Muslim in the White House. In response to Ben Carson, Twitter user (and Libyan-American Muslim woman) Hend Amry pointed and laughed, launching the hashtag #HowToStopAMuslimPresident. (First idea: all-bacon White House.) She’s one of a growing number of Muslim women who are using social media (and a healthy dose of humor) to speak truth to preconceptions.
Sana Saeed | @sanasaeed
A producer at AJ+, Al Jazeera’s all-digital, Facebook-centric channel, she coined the term “faithwashing”: when people say conflicts like Israel and Palestine’s are merely religious. Social media, she says, “allows all of us Muslim women—who veil, don’t veil, veil sometimes, veil everything, veil very little—to critique popular representations.”
Tanzila Ahmed and Zahra Noorbakhsh | #GoodMuslim-BadMuslim podcast
“There are so many things I didn’t know about being Muslim until the media told me about it,” quips Noorbakhsh on this podcast. Ahmed is most proud of how many younger women they reach with their chatty format: “We speak to them in a way that no one has before.”
Zainab Bint Younus | The Salafi Feminist blog
Responding to the concerns that women in niqabs need rescuing, this Canadian blogger—who wears the face covering—collected selfies from others like her. The results? Pretty boring … if you think covered ladies playing street hockey and riding Jet Skis are boring.
Hend Amry | @libyaliberty
When Bill Maher claimed that ISIS fighters aren’t outliers in their violence, she tweeted, “Five of the last 12 Nobel Peace Prize winners were Muslim. So according to Bill Maher, we’re all Peace Prize winners!” It was retweeted more than 7,800 times. But her best joke was that Princess Leia is a headscarf short of being “sharia-compliant.”
