As Salaam Alaykum wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuhu,
Many are aware of the recent controversy surrounding Facebook and a member lead group ‘Draw Muhammad Day’, which was meant to offend Muslims around the world by encouraging people to draw the noble prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam.
To some extent, the group was successful. A South African newspaper published a caricature that had the beloved prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam, on a psychiatrists’ couch lamenting his followers lack of a sense of humour, which went beyond the offence of merely drawing him but to insinuate that he needed psychiatric care. Apparently, this South African cartoonist wanted to show us that everything is subject to satire. I understand he has changed his opinion.
While this has been the most offensive use of Facebook, there are many more groups, pages and profiles created with the sole purpose of gathering like-minded bigots to offend Muslims. On the other side, many Muslims complain at the unexpected and unexplained closure of Islamic groups. Although I have not witnessed that myself, I would not be shocked if that were the case.
The Muslim response to these outrages has been spastic at best. Pakistan’s brief blocking did more harm than good. The brothers and sisters calling for a boycott of Facebook but coming on every day to post and email from their boycott Facebook group was strange. Others complained about the call to boycott, instead opting to remain ignorant about their favourite social network.
There were little positives Roadside to Islam had a campaign to create a 30 second video saying that you love the prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam. I made the video in this post to contribute to that campaign. The effectiveness of that effort was greatly diminished by the low number of people willing to be involved and ultimately Roadside to Islam’s failure to post their own video.
Our lack of organisation and one-mindedness is a primary reason for our world wide failures, which gave Facebook the option of simply ignoring our concerns with little to no negative consequences.
If our local corner shop had a notice board where they allowed messages similar to some Facebook pages, would we use that corner shop? I am confident that we would not, even if that meant we had to walk a bit further and pay a bit more. So why do we stick around a website that clearly does not respect us?
How should we as Muslim be using Facebook and other social media websites?
It is my recommendation (whatever that is worth) to only use social media websites for the purposes of dawah. If you do no dawah, you should not use these sites at all (just like the corner shop that you would boycott). If you are involved in dawah, perhaps the use of such sites is justified but even then it must be done with restrictions.
You should not post personal messages, photos, notes (blogs), videos to your own time-line or in response to an action of another member. You should never create a advertisement and you should be careful to never click on someone else’s advertisement. You should not create pages and groups that are for non-dawah purposes nor should you ‘like’ them. Most importantly, you should not send your website traffic to these sites by placing links to groups and pages. Moreover, you should always attempt to divert traffic from these sites to your own website.
If you want to use a social media website how they were intended to be used, please join an Islamic social media website. If that site has any weaknesses, it’s too slow or something else, try another or contact the owners of the website and offer to help them to make the website better. Muslim social media websites need to make their services open to contribution and shared responsibility.
I would love to read your opinions, were you aware of the Facebook controversy and did it make you change the way you use the site?
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