On September 29, CNN aired an interview with Reza Aslan, a writer and professor on the subject of religion, who stated the core problem in discussing the current issues in “the Muslim world”: “You’re talking about a religion about 1.5 billion people and certainly it becomes easy to just simply paint them all with a single brush”.

While people have been voicing their opinions on current events for years, social media has taken a more prevalent role in society, and hashtags have become the leaders in policy making.  More and more, people around the world are using the so-called “twitterspehere” to voice their opinions on the self-proclaimed “Islamic State”

The most popular trends these past few days have been hashtags such as #notinmyname and #muslimapologies.  Both of these trends were started by Muslims around the world, which grew tired of having to defend their religion.  In their opinion, Islam has contributed ethics and values of peace and innovation to society and does not deserve to be attacked for the actions of extremists.

Young Muslims in the UK released a video last month condemning ISIS’s use of Islam to justify their campaigns.  A London-based charity, known as the Active Change Foundation, posted the video is response to the murder of David Hines and the kidnapping of Alan Hemming, both British residents.  The overall message of these activists is to show both the leaders of ISIS and the global community that the actions of this extremist group should not be in the name of Islam, thus #notinmyname.

More recent is the trend of tweeting #muslimapologies.  The bulk of these tweets fall into two categories, either stating positive contributions to society by Muslims or satirically apologizing for these innovations, or sarcastically apologizing for events, which Islam did not a play a role.

An example of the former is a screenshot of a tumblr post in a tweet listing items such as coffee, cameras, university, the pendulum and soap followed by an apology for inventing and discovering the aforementioned items.  Some more apologies are for key values of Islam such as forgiveness, donating to charity, and education.

A more ironic response is an image of a T-Shirt that has been tweeted and shared, and on which states: “I’m Muslim and I’m sorry for everything…In the past, present, and future,” suggesting that every event that has and will happen throughout time is on account of Muslims.  Obviously, Islam did not play a role in catastrophic events throughout time, even though it has been the used as a scapegoat and thus mis-labeled as a religion of violence.

Overall, these tweets set an example for all those who have been targeted based on ignorance.  Why cause more trouble and inflict more negative views through petty defensiveness when there is the option to make people laugh a bit?