Growing up as a Muslim kid in a post-9/11 world, I felt in the back of my mind a sense of vulnerability in a Western country. Especially in the past few years, when the leader of the free world points to Islam as violent and oppressive, I always feel defensive of my religion. The terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand when a white man attacked and killed 50 Muslims during Friday prayer added a new layer to this fear of Islamophobia.
The day after the tragedy occurred, my phone felt like a car accident I couldn’t look away from. It hurt to read the details of the shooting, but I needed to see the news for updates and I needed to talk to my family and friends. I didn’t expect social media to make me feel better, but at best it distracted me. Following so many Muslim accounts and activism accounts, I ended up cover the fear with anger. So I turned to my phone to fuel my righteous anger into enacting change through activism like our generation does after every tragedy.
But this time, I’ve read professor Khaled Beydoun’s writings on Islamophobia in my class on Being Muslim in America and because I liked his ideas so much, I followed him on Twitter. His coverage of the New Zealand tragedy changed my outlook on Islamophobia entirely. Through the power of a Twitter thread and the hashtags #49lives and later #50lives, he humanized the victims and made their lives matter more than a statistic. He simultaneously stripped the shooter’s goal of making the tragedy about making Muslims feel unwelcome in a Western country and celebrated the victims’ lives and gifts to society. Like the empathetic Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern, he refused to give the shooter notoriety in name or mission and focused on the community who was hurt and who could be helped moving forward. For the first time after a hate crime and mass murder, I felt like i was doing the martyrs’ deaths justice as well as truly feeling their loss.
Social media can often be toxic, but this Twitter thread helped me to not give into destructive anger. I am not giving anything up to the shooter or to his white nationalism. This thread did not just improve my day or help me mourn for Christchurch but it changed how I will respond to Islamophobia or any form of hatred in the future. Khaled Beydoun’s thread taught me to learn about the victims of tragedies and give their lives meaning and closure.