ABSTRACT
Commanding the right and forbidding the wrong (al-amr bi-l-maʿrūf wa-n-nahy ʿani-l-munkar) is a foundational concept in Islamic social ethics, rooted in the Qur’anic injunction to promote ethical behavior and denounce sinful acts within the Muslim community. In this chapter, I analyze how Twitter has become an important tool for the exercise of this form of Islamic moral surveillance. I discuss a series of English-language posts involving LGBTQ Muslims and their detractors. In these posts, queer Muslims defend themselves against homophobic and transphobic attacks from Muslims who question the permissibility of LGBTQ identities within an Islamic framework. I find that queer Muslims use Twitter comments and memes in order to expose the hypocrisy of their anti-LGBTQ Muslim interlocutors, reworking popular genres of internet humor to argue that their sexuality and gender identity has little to do with their moral standing as Muslims. I consider these debates about Islamic sexual ethics as an example of how social media enable new forms of social surveillance (Marwick, 2012) and moral subject formation within Muslim communities. Through this digital ethnography, I argue that media anthropologists must consider surveillance an aspect of interpersonal relations rather than solely as an aspect of institutional governance.
