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Social media platforms in a competitive commercial landscape require your constant attention. The longer you stay, the more you are susceptible to promoted content and ads. The best way to keep you there is to outrage and incite you. Anger feeds content, content feeds revenue. Muslim’s that engage on social media often contribute to the online antagonism that reflects the coarse and crude trend of wider society. It goes like this, someone tweets a view, sometimes coherent and thought through and sometimes not and within a short space of time, it solicits a torrent of abuse.

 Before long, we feed off each other’s outrage, borrowing anger and calling for retribution. This atmosphere leaves little for nuance, for clarification and engagement. Worse still, social media engagements help to engender a sense of disunity with which our ummah is plagued and benefits those actors that want to sow division within our ranks. If policy makers want to exacerbate division in our communities, Muslim’s on Twitter and Facebook are low-hanging fruits.

This past week I have witnessed such problematic social media disputes. A sister sent a tweet about women becoming hufadth. Maybe she could have phrased the message better and crafted it differently, but we are all guilty of that. Within time, she received a torrent of anger. Her point was lost, any meaningful clarification was drowned out and she became another victim of this contrived ‘cancel culture’. We see these types of debates all the time. A scholar sends out a message and before long, his views are ridiculed with little consideration of Allah’s limits. Somehow, we think our timelines are exempt from the angels records.

Sending people to the stocks did not start with social media. The Muslim Ummah today is undermined by its disunity. But certainly, this acrimony is amplified by the anonymity of the medium, where an expert is ranked equally to a layman and abuse, defamation and slander are a sure route to likes.

This week on The Thinking Muslim we look at ‘Muslim Twitter’, what causes the bitterness? how do we tone down the rhetoric and how can the revelation and our illustrious scholarly past help us to rectify our manners of engagement?

Justin Parrot holds an MRes in Islamic Studies from the University of Wales and is currently Research Librarian for Middle East Studies at NYU in Abu Dhabi where he is also a volunteer Imam for the Muslim Students Association. He also runs an amazing website with a unique accessible hadith repository, available at https://abuaminaelias.com.