Source: RNS
By Aysha  Khan

(RNS) When Laila Alawa woke up on a recent morning, her phone wouldn’t stop pinging with Twitter notifications.

“You’re not American, you’re a terrorist sympathizer immigrant that nobody in America wants and for good reason,” one user tweeted.

“This c**t needs to be packed in a freight container, deported+ dumped mid-ocean like the garbage she is,” wrote another. Still others called her a traitor, a terrorist, a pig.

“Five minutes would go by and I would refresh my Twitter, and 20-plus new tweets would have come in,” Alawa, who wears a hijab and runs a Muslim-led feminist media company in Washington, said. “Each one was more hateful than the last.”

Muslim women like Alawa have worked to create a vibrant space for themselves in the online world. But increasingly, many groups — from Islamophobes to conservative Muslims to feminists — are using social media’s anonymity and lack of accountability to pry that from them.

It didn’t take long for Alawa, 24, to pin down the cause of the firestorm: a single post on a right-wing blog. A writer there had seen her association with a new Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism report, then scoured Alawa’s social media until he found a 2014 tweet that said 9/11 had changed the world “for good.” (The phrase “for good” can, of course, mean “permanently” rather than “for the better.”) The tweet spawned dozens more, including one by leading anti-Muslim blogger Pamela Geller.

The net result: a phone buzzing with thousands upon thousands of inflammatory tweets, Facebook messages, emails, Instagram notifications and more. Most were filled with insults, threats and rants on everything from genital mutilation to Shariah law to comparisons between Alawa and the Orlando, Fla., nightclub shooter. But many came in solidarity, too — from fellow Wellesley alumnae, Muslim American writers and Alawa’s smartphone-armed sisters in faith.

Moving online

In the last decade, young Muslim women have developed a strong digital presence that has paved the way to greater public engagement with the media by way of hijab video tutorials like those of British fashion superstar Dina Torkia, or viral Twitter hashtags like the feminist #YesAllWomen.

“A lot of times Muslim women have no choice but to go to the online space,” said Wardah Khalid, a Middle East policy analyst who spent years writing the Houston Chronicle’s Young American Muslim blog and regularly gets messages calling her a “raghead” or saying she is oppressed. “If you look at some of the traditional institutions that are purporting to speak for Muslims, the vast majority of their boards are male. That’s why Muslim women have taken such a large online presence. They created that space for themselves.”

Read more