It’s a shame we must have #NotInMyName

This is not a piece I envisaged I would ever write. Isil is not a subject that dominates my family dinner table or chats with friends and colleagues. As a young journalist I have privately vowed never to take up the mantle of “voice of my generation” or to act as a spokesperson for British Muslims or Islam.

In truth, I spent my evenings this week worrying about whether or not Chelsea would win their opening Champions League game rather than fretting over the strategic implications of the latest beheading video to come out of Raqqa. The actions of the self-styled Islamic State are so divorced from the banal realities of my life that news from Syria and Iraq becomes just another grim headline when I come into The Telegraph office every morning.

They are neither a “state” nor proponents of any vision of Islam that I have ever encountered. Indeed, I still most identify the word Isis, as we used to call Islamic State, with the river I first encountered during my freshers’ week at Oxford.

The terms “jihadi” and “jihadist”, meanwhile, have been appropriated to label the likes of the murderer “Jihadi John” and his fellow thugs. But my jihad is no millenarian fight for a Caliphate. My jihad, which means struggle, is to wake up on time for work, to squeeze my prayers in, and make sure I speak to my mum at least three times a week.

Every day, myself and others who wear outward manifestations of our faith face a small jihad to convince people, on first meeting, that we don’t harbour extremist tendencies and that we are not oppressed (except perhaps by a devotion to Premier League football). On the whole, I think we manage to succeed pretty well.

And yet events in Iraq and Syria mean no Muslim can truly disengage from the actions of Isil, for fear that our perceived “silence” is taken as acquiescence. It is for these reasons I wake up dreading seeing a balaclava-clad face adorning this newspaper. And it is for these reasons that my friends and family fret about every murmuring of a potential terrorist outrage or bomb threat on Western shores, for fear that the perpetrators claim to be speaking in the name of our faith.

Yet the idea that anyone who identifies with Islam must speak out and condemn acts so reprehensible is absurd. It can even be dangerous. During the recent war in Gaza, the Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mervis, warned in these pages that the conflict had become “a pseudo-legitimate medium for latent anti-Semitism” as Jews worldwide were somehow asked to account for, or even attacked, because of the deaths of civilians which they had nothing to do with.

The Chief Rabbi’s sentiments sum up precisely why I feel sad about the current #NotinMyName campaign, which Muslims here are using to protest about the actions of Isil. Of course, Isil is a criminal outfit which commit acts of barbarism. But the sole element of “Jihadi John” that resonates with me is his accent. His Estuary English echoes my own voice and that of my friends – many of whom are, like me, Muslims in their early twenties, working in the media, law, government or banking.

Like those young people starting the #NotInMyName campaign to reclaim social media from these fanatics, I can’t help that I share my skin tone, ethnicity or accent with Isil brutes. Like them, my biggest fear now is that this Isil murderer’s ostensibly British voice echoes in the minds of those here, as they see ordinary Muslims in Britain going about our business. Unlike the young campaigners, however, I feel at times that even a cacophony of moderate voices would not suffice to reassure those for whom British Muslims are still objects of suspicion – integrated yet alien.

But let me be plain. If the crimes committed against James Foley, Steven Sotloff and David Haines seem senseless and inhuman to non-Muslims, they are even more egregious when viewed with this Muslim’s eyes.

Maniacs like the captors of Alan Henning have always existed. What hasn’t is the technology to beam their poisonous rhetoric on to our Twitter feeds and computer screens. That has left many Muslims feeling compelled to reclaim the social media battleground with campaigns such as #NotInMyName. But the worthy desire to lambast Isil should not morph into an obligation to apologise for being a Muslim. Much better, then, for Muslims to stop worrying about themselves and instead go online to salute the extraordinary charity work of Mr Henning. Through his devotion to aiding Syrians he has shown up me and many of my co-religionists, as ours is a faith that impels us to help those in need. That is our real shame.