Muslim Americans are telling their stories on Twitter to break through Islamophobia

Muslim Americans from across the country are sharing their diverse faces and stories online with the hashtag #MuslimAmericanFaces, in response to an uptick in Islamophobia since the terrorist attacks in Paris last month.

Some people told us a little bit about what they do and what they love:

https://twitter.com/SeedoAmjad/status/674815446697312257

Tech geek/marketer. Coffee. Social media traveler. Drama queen. #MuslimAmericanFaces pic.twitter.com/szN2d9pW6k

— Saba Anees (@sabaanees) December 10, 2015

https://twitter.com/nashwahakhtar/status/674740847829626881

Others shared photos with their family and friends:

Benjamin Wittes, a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies, at the Brookings Institution, kicked off #MuslimAmericanFaces yesterday by tweeting about his Muslim colleague, Mai El-Sadany:

Wittes said the anti-Muslim rhetoric being spread by politicians and others is “becoming very ugly.” Donald Trump has said he wants to ban all Muslims from coming to America, and Ben Carson suggested that Muslim Americans can’t be president. Meanwhile, the Council on American-Islamic Relations says that they are receiving multiple reports of alleged hate crimes against Muslims every day. Wittes said that with this Twitter campaign he wanted to challenge the de-humanization of Muslim Americans.

“I’m not one of those people that thinks a hashtag can change the world,” he told Refinery 29. “My goal for it was to simply to remind people that they are talking about real people here. When leading politicians say things that are as vile as things that have been said about Muslims recently, it’s really important to remember that you’re talking about a very diverse community. These people have real lives and real faces.”