Hybrid Muslim identities in digital space: The Italian blog Yalla

Abstract

Islam is often regarded as being incompatible with European values. In Italy, for example, anti-Islamic points of view reiterate the religion’s alleged inconsistency with Catholicism and secularism. This article argues that narrative practices can challenge this idea by articulating Muslim hybrid identities that are compatible with Italian culture and society. The second-generation blog Yalla Italia represents a ‘third space’ where young Italian Muslims contrast dominant media stereotypes, thereby creating ‘disruptive flows of dissent’. A textual analysis of the blog and interviews with some of the bloggers reveal that three main topics are employed to overcome marginalization: (1) critiques of mainstream media (2) narratives about family lives and the practice of Islam, and (3) advocacy of a quicker procedure for gaining Italian citizenship. The bloggers adopt a storytelling style to press for social and institutional change and explain how they succeed in adapting Islam to Italian society. Their religious diversity is thus perceived as providing a potential for Italy, rather than being a mark of marginalization.

Introduction

Anti-Islamic hysteria is everywhere and Muslims are forced (once again) to repeat ‘we have nothing to do with this’ or ‘this is not Islam’ or ‘we firmly condemn all this’, hoping others will believe [us] (Ismahan Hassen, 9 January 2015)

The terrorist attack against Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 forced Europe to reflect on the Muslim presence within its society. In the aftermath of this and other acts of terror on the continent in 2015 and 2016, many Muslims felt the need to dissociate themselves from the ideologies and religiosity of the terrorists. Some Italian Muslims used the online platform Yalla Italia (hereafter Yalla, www.yallaitalia.it) to share their feelings about the Charlie Hebdo attack, as exemplified by the above quote from Ismahan Hassen. While condemning a type of Islam that fosters violence, the Yalla blog voices the frustration felt by second-generation Italians of Muslim faith at the continual need to justify their religiosity in a Western context.

Attacks such as that against Charlie Hebdo seem to confirm a certain vision of Islam as violent, non-democratic, and unwilling to accept European and Christian values – a vision often voiced by xenophobic political parties (Betz and Meret, 2009; Pisoiu, 2013; Savage, 2010). However, Muslims’ daily narratives are often able to reconcile Muslim identities with European values, thus challenging anti-Islam discourses. Through an analysis of the Italian blog Yalla, this article argues against the idea of a monolithic Islam that cannot adapt to European modernity. The blog’s discourses prove that it is possible to articulate hybrid Muslim identities in a way that reconciles Italianness with Islam. The Internet differs somewhat from other media in its ability to provide a space for more nuanced identity negotiations and discourse formations. Yalla shows that through narrative practices positioned in between private and public experiences, Italian Muslims try to challenge stereotypes in order to overcome a sense of marginalization and advocate for social change. In doing so, they are able to create ‘disruptive flows of dissent’ (Echchaibi, 2013) that subvert dominant narratives.

1. Catholicism and secularism in Italy

Italy is a predominantly Catholic country where around 75 percent of the population self-identifies as Catholic and an even higher percentage have been baptized Catholic (Doxa, 2014). Catholicism is deeply embedded in Italian society, politics, and education (Frisina, 2011), and the Catholic Church plays a prominent role in civil society (Garelli, 2007). Furthermore, mainstream media tends to represent Italian identity as intrinsically Catholic (Ardizzoni, 2007).

The overwhelming presence of Catholicism in the Italian public sphere is usually considered to be compatible with the secular character of the Italian state and its recognition of the principle of religious freedom. According to Frisina (2011: 272), this happens because Italian society is based on a ‘Catholic model of secularism’, which is ‘founded on the social representation of Catholicism as the cultural basis of the nation’s identity’. According to this model, Catholic values inspire secular values and act as a wellspring from which the country’s ethics and morality can emerge, thus making them intrinsic elements of Italian history and society (Joppke, 2013; Mancini, 2010).

The ‘Catholic mode of secularism’ stresses the importance of the Judeo-Christian roots of European civilization and indirectly marginalizes minority religions such as Islam. Indeed, while Christianity is generally seen as being able to inspire and validate secular values, Islam is often viewed as unable to respect the separation of religion and politics that is needed to create secular identities in late modernity (Asad, 2003; Casanova, 2004). Italian and European anti-Islamic discourses often stress Islam’s alleged inability to keep out of public and institutional space, describing it as ‘fundamentalist, dangerous and backwards’ (Talhami, 2004: 154). These positions connoting Islam as ‘un-European’ by virtue of its supposed inability to adapt to the continent’s values are symptomatic of anxieties about a changing society whose Muslim population is steadily increasing.

2. Islam in Europe and Italy

Attitudes that reiterate the alleged incompatibility of Islam and Western democracy are often unable to capture the dynamic changes of European society and religiosity. A number of studies have analysed strategies of cultural and social adaptations of Muslims in Europe, as well as the articulation of hybrid identities (Roy, 2013; Tibi, 2010). Similarly, other studies (Arfi, 2010; Jones, 2013; Talhami, 2004; Yeğenoğlu, 2006) show how European identity is not homogeneously based on secularism and Christianity, often formed instead through the exclusion of ethnic and religious groups, thereby creating fear of the ‘Muslim other’.

Muslims are estimated to comprise around 2 percent of the Italian population ¹ (CESNUR, 2014) and Islam is the fastest growing religion in the country (Pace, 2013). Strategies of religious adaptation are visible in Italy among young, second-generation Muslims (Frisina, 2011), and among mixed couples where one partner practices Islam (Cerchiaro et al., 2015). Muslims, especially women, often negotiate their identities by articulating discourses that resist the political use of secularism (Salih, 2004). These processes of identity-negotiation and practice-articulation are often intertwined with a variety of media practices (el-Aswad, 2013). On the one hand, the media contributes to the fear of Islam by offering biased and superficial descriptions of Muslim communities in Italy and by condemning, for example, migration and the construction of mosques (Mezran, 2013; Saint-Blancat and Friedberg, 2005; Vaccari, 2009). On the other hand, second-generation and Muslim Italians use media to negotiate hybrid identities, move beyond stereotypes, and promote integration (Toronto, 2008; Zinn, 2011). Studying the media – and the Internet in particular – allows us to understand the strategies they adopt to articulate identity and adapt socially. This article situates itself within existing scholarship about Islam in Italy and Europe, while taking the innovative approach of analysing Internet discourses.

3. Religious ‘third spaces’ and Muslim blogs

Media have an impact on the negotiation of religious practices and identities. The mediation of religion has a ‘horizontalizing’ impact on religion because it provides spaces for re-thinking authority and symbols. As a result, media have the potential to disrupt the traditional power hierarchies between those who hold truth claims and those who do not; traditional religious authorities lose their role of providing an interpretative framework for symbols, and believers gain greater agency in determining their own religious meanings (Hoover, 2006).

Digital spaces influence religions in late modernity, creating the phenomenon that Campbell (2012) describes as ‘networked religion’. The Internet also has the potential to become a space of ‘lived religion’ (McGuire, 2008) where believers can discuss matters of practice and faith. Moreover, the articulation of religious discourses on the Internet can create a ‘third space’ – a concept which has been employed in different contexts to refer to a space ‘in-between’ physical and metaphorical venues. Bhabha (1990) refers to a ‘third space’ to describe the creation of hybridized cultures and subjectivities in post-colonialism. Hoover and Echchaibi (2014: 13) apply the concept of ‘third space’ to the Internet in relation to the formation of religious communities that encompass new aesthetics and new forms of authority, enabling an ‘engagement with technology, practice, and lived experience’.

Blogs can be considered to be ‘third spaces’ when they articulate non-mainstream identities and resist political pressure. Blogging is a form of digital engagement that has the potential to serve individuals’ and communities’ communication needs and link them to the larger mediasphere, creating alternative venues for grassroots journalism (Echchaibi and Russell, 2009). Blogs can enhance the practices and beliefs of religious groups and individuals because they permit direct and immediate representations of private experiences in the public sphere, in a manner that differs from other media such as television and newspapers. They elicit active engagement with their readers and can form an alternative type of public through the circulation of religious narratives (Lövheim, 2011).

Muslim blogs in the West are often concerned with negotiating secular identities within Islam. For example, the blog Muslimah Media Watch, which is written by Muslim women, promotes alternative media practices to create what Echchaibi (2013) defines as ‘disruptive flows of dissent’. The blog does not aim to radically subverting hegemony, but rather represents a ‘cultural thickening’ in a larger project of cultural change (2013: 2). According to Echchaibi, the effectiveness of blogs should not be assessed in terms of concrete and short-term achievements, but in relation to the fluidity of cultural and social progresses.

In resisting dominant culture through aesthetic and performative spaces, Muslimah Media Watch reflects on the position of Islam within Western modernity. As a result, the blog creates dissent that can bring about long-term changes in the perception of Muslim women within established discursive production; moreover, it articulates ‘hybrid Muslim subjectivities’ (Echchaibi, 2013: 3). In a similar fashion, Yalla Italia aims to create oppositional narratives that challenge stereotypes and help situate the position of Muslim identities in Italian modernity.

4. The Yalla blog

Yalla tells stories of migration and multiculturalism from the perspective of second-generations, a term connoting people who are born or raised in Italy by foreign parents, and whose identity is situated between different religions and cultures. Yalla (meaning ‘Let’s go’ in Arabic) was founded in 2006 by journalist Martino Pillitteri and university professor in Islamic Studies Paolo Branca, both non-Muslims who are personally and professionally interested in the Muslim community in Italy. Pillitteri and Branca started the project because they felt that there was a need for the direct self-representation of Arab-Italians, who lacked a voice in the mainstream media. The fact that Yalla had non-Muslim and non-Arab founders was certainly among its unique characteristics: Yalla also distinguishes itself from other Muslim blogs in Italy because it does not follow official Muslim authorities and targets a multireligious and multicultural audience.

Interviews with Yalla’s founders provided insights into its scope and structure. Yalla started out as a printed publication before becoming a blog in 2011, establishing a presence on Facebook and Twitter in order to circulate its posts. While its bloggers were initially only Muslims from the city of Milan, Yalla has since added contributors from other religions, ethnicities, and Italian cities. The blog used to publish posts on a daily basis, with an average of 2,000 visits every day. However, in 2015 Yalla started to decrease its activity and re-think its identity: in the future, Yalla might become more global in scope, or it might just end (Pillitteri, personal communication, May 29, 2015).

Yalla’s posts attract a wide readership, sometimes generating up to a hundred comments per post. Yalla mainly targets other second-generation Italians and those who are interested in multiculturalism, but the bloggers do not refrain from engaging in digital conversations with anti-Islamic readers. Indeed Pillitteri, who functions as blog’s moderator, usually chooses to publish offensive and racist comments in order to enable discussion and confrontation. The blog format actually allows for the formation of an interactive community of readers who often contribute to the negotiation of Muslim identities. Yalla’s community dimension is enhanced by its collective character: the blog numbers forty collaborators, some of whom are part of the editorial staff, all under the direction of Pillitteri. Apart from Pillitteri, the bloggers are not professional journalists and are usually recruited through second-generation and Arab-Italian associations (Branca, personal communication, 31 May 2015)

The majority of Yalla’s contributors are women. The interviews and blog analysis reveal no clear reason why this is the case, but an explanation could be found in the need felt by Muslim women to express their voices in non-traditional venues. As the blog Muslimah Media Watch exemplifies (Echchaibi, 2013), media can become venues for women to negotiate their religious identity and contrast gender-influenced structures of power. According to Lövheim (2011, 2013), women often create digital ‘ethical spaces’ where they discuss cultural and social norms situated in between private and public experiences. For example, women use the Internet to claim their rights within Islam, challenge mainstream media representations, and discuss gender roles from a Muslim perspective (Piela, 2013; Vis et al., 2011). Yalla’s attention to topics such as women in interreligious couples and the meaning of the hijab is probably motivated by the fact that Muslim women in Italy are further marginalized in their opportunities for self-representation because of their gender.

Yalla welcomes contributors from every background and religion and does not explicitly use the label ‘Muslim blog’. However, since it aims to capture dynamic changes in Italian society, which is currently facing increasing migration from Muslim countries, and since the majority of its contributors self-identify as Muslims, Yalla constitutes a highly informative platform for understanding Islam in Italy. In analysing Yalla, I have explored the interplay between digital space and offline experiences. Why did the bloggers choose a digital platform to articulate their ideas? Which topics are emphasized to describe the experience of Islam in Italy? Which strategies do they employ to overcome social stigma? To address such questions, I performed a qualitative textual analysis of Yalla by analysing posts and readers’ comments from 2011 – when the blog went online – until March 2015, when the blog started to decrease the number of its posts. In addition, I conducted face-to-face semi-structured interviews with the two founders of the blog and four of the bloggers in May and June 2015. I translated quotes and interviews from Italian and used the real names of the bloggers, which is how they sign their posts. The analysis of blog posts and interviews reveals that Yalla provides a platform for topics that are often overlooked by public discourses about Islam in Italy.

5. Results and discussion

Yalla’s posts are written in a storytelling style that the bloggers utilize for describing their daily routine. The aesthetic technique of storytelling is a way of expressing opinions in an indirect manner: the bloggers do not openly advocate religious pluralism, but their personal experiences implicitly point to social and political issues connected with religious integration.

The analysis of posts on Yalla reveals not only a strong effort to overcome marginalization and connect with mainstream society, but also a focus on three main topics that are used as a means of articulating hybrid identities: first, a critique of mainstream media shows the communication potential of digital space; second, narratives about family matters normalize the practice of Islam within Italian culture; and third, advocacy for a quicker naturalization process for Italian citizenship reveals the willingness of Muslims to be recognized as Italians.

Digital challenges to media stereotypes

Yalla often criticizes Italian mainstream media for being partial and biased in the treatment of topics such as multiculturalism and religious pluralism. The blog does not explicitly articulate the notion of ‘mainstream media’, but it could be argued that the concept refers to national television, radio, and newspapers. Yalla states that media often focus on Muslims in order to attract the audience’s attention and make certain news more interesting. According to the blogger Rania Ibrahim, for example, it is ‘humiliating and irrelevant’ that veiled women become ‘news’ only in virtue of their religiosity:

I think that if one day I were to climb Everest blindfolded or become mayor of my city, I would not cause any reaction in the traditional mass media. BUT, if I were to do these actions with a nice Islamic veil that frames my face … well I’d be on the front pages of the newspapers. But when did wearing a veil, or worse being a Muslim, become so exceptional as to provoke a fuss? (Rania Ibrahim, 12 October 2012, emphasis in original)

Yalla’s bloggers argue that this sensationalism is caused by media practitioners’ insufficient knowledge of Islam and its followers. Ibrahim’s post denounces, in particular, the problematic representation of Muslim women, who tend to be accorded attention only in virtue of their veils, and not for their opinions.

Yalla condemns two main negative media biases in Italy. On the one hand, media tend to portray all Muslims as ‘bad Arabs’, reiterating stereotypes of Islam as anti-democratic and violent. On the other hand, media perpetuate the stereotype of the ‘poor migrant’, portraying all Muslims as culturally and economically backward and automatically associating them with illegal immigrants. Both these stereotypes connote Islam as fundamentally incompatible with Italian society. Yalla does not negate the existence of radical Islam communities and illegal immigration, but it does challenge the idea that Islam in Italy is monolithic and homogeneous.

The critique of mainstream media explains why Yalla’s bloggers have chosen a digital platform as a place to share their ideas. Italian Muslims experience challenges when it comes to making their voices heard: mainstream media tend either to fail to give them space or distort their opinions because they do not fit the media biases described above. As blog co-founder Branca notes:

The media are sensationalistic and they want to give alarming news, but this news [Yalla’s stories] would be reassuring, so they enter this ambiguous game where if you are not radical, fundamentalist and extreme you cannot be a Muslim. (Branca, personal communication, 31 May 2015)

Digital spaces, in this case a blog, make it possible to experiment with narrative techniques that can better allow stereotypes to be subverted, and offer a platform for voices that often cannot find space in mainstream media narrations. Pillitteri actually instructs the bloggers to be provocative without being aggressive, and to underline problems without complaining (personal communication, May 29, 2015). With its direct and provocative style, Yalla wants to build a space that is more effective than mainstream media in raising awareness of certain issues. In this way, the bloggers employ the Internet to overcome the risk of being an ‘invisible category’ (Zinn, 2011) or falling into generalizations and stereotypes.

Narratives of family life

Yalla often describes its bloggers’ relationships with parents and partners in a colloquial manner, underlining generational clashes while also noting similarities with their Italian peers’ experiences. Because the bloggers are situated between two cultures and two religions, family experiences are useful in describing efforts to negotiate identity:

For our parents it is a complex challenge. Unlike what many Italians believe, our Arab parents aren’t their Italian children’s enemies. They are just people who often encounter difficulties in raising children, because it is not at all easy to find the right balance between two cultures and emphasize the best of both. (Imane Barmaki, 24 March 2014)

As exemplified by the quote, Yalla’s bloggers do not describe their family issues as the product of a backward religion unable to adapt to Western values. On the contrary, the generational clash is normalized as a phenomenon that can enrich family experiences despite requiring an effort to reach mutual understanding. When the bloggers describe their family experiences they are treasuring their own ability to connect two cultures.

In writing about their everyday experiences, the bloggers give insights into their strategies for adapting the Muslim faith to Italian culture. If second-generation Muslims in a Western context are to articulate their identity, they have to reconcile their own family experience (and the values they learned within their families) with Italian values and culture. Yalla’s bloggers take a heterogeneous approach to Islam: for example, some choose a Muslim partner and others pick one who is not a Muslim; some of the women wear the veil and others do not. The bloggers always stress the importance of making their own religious choices and critically evaluating religious habits and practices:

When they ask me ‘Bahija do you observe Ramadan?’ and I answer with a resounding YES, I always face grimaces that make me understand how incredulous they are. […] OK, I don’t change my dress habits (maybe I’m showing my décolleté a little too much?!?), I listen to music and I go dancing (obviously during the evening), I make exceptions on one or two days to have lunch with my colleagues… […] I admit I’m not the emblem of the perfect Muslim; I just commit sins like everybody, don’t I? (Bahija Monssif, 17 August 2012)

Family narratives enable the bloggers to explore their daily relationships with Islam together with the negotiation of family values. In their constant definition of Muslim identities, they are ‘Muslims in their own way’, as suggested by Pillitteri (personal communication, 29 May 2015). Refusing to follow traditional religious authorities, their religiosity tends to be lived more at the level of family experience than in the public sphere. Blogging becomes a way of negotiating traditional religious authority and forming a non-traditional community. In particular, women within Yalla often do not feel accepted in Italian mosques because they tend to personalize their approach to Muslim practices, as exemplified by the above description of Ramadan by Bahija Monssif. Yalla is a space beyond traditional authoritarian structures where Muslim practices can be discussed and reflected upon.

This privatization of religion challenges the idea that Islam is totalizing and incompatible with a secular society. The blogger Oussama Mansour, for example, describes himself by saying: ‘I am Muslim in the same way many Italians are Catholic’ (29 October 2014). The bloggers see their Catholic peers taking a selective approach to Catholicism and overlooking many precepts of the Vatican; they often choose to do the same with Islam, whose practice at family level does not diverge from Italian culture and secular values.

Being Italian on an institutional level: Citizenship

Yalla extensively covers the issue of citizenship, showing the bloggers’ engagement with institutional change. Italian legislation on citizenship is inspired by the jus sanguinis principle: because children automatically gain their parents’ citizenship, those born of foreign parents on Italian soil are not granted Italian citizenship. Therefore, unless their parents apply for citizenship themselves while their children are still minors, second-generations have to wait until they are eighteen to apply in their own right, often having to deal with a slow and disorganized bureaucratic system. This situation is problematic for second-generations, who find themselves receiving fewer opportunities than their Italian peers in terms of education, career, and political involvement.

Yalla shows how citizenship is not only a legal problem, but also an identity issue. Without actually rejecting their family culture, Yalla’s bloggers often assert their Italianness. They feel Italian because of their education and the values they were raised with, and Italian citizenship becomes a way of reiterating this essential part of their identity. Yalla often articulates feelings of belonging to the Italian state, culture, and society:

We are even more Italian because we choose to be Italian, you are born Italian and never questioned it, but we questioned our identity and chose to be Italian. […] WE ARE ITALIAN (Sara Abd Alla, comment on a post, 13 March 2013, emphasis in original)

Citizenship, while not a religious issue strictu sensu, is often perceived as a mark of further marginalization for Muslims. Yalla’s posts and their comments reveal that non-Muslims often view Islam as being incompatible with Western institutions. The laws of democratic states cannot discriminate on the basis of religion, but anti-Muslim attitudes can negatively influence public opinion on citizenship. These attitudes, which Yalla strongly criticizes, are often found in comments on the website’s posts:

A wise and civil country, because of the EVIDENCE that Islam is a persecutor, invader, and violent, would NEVER give Muslims citizenship. […] A Muslim will NEVER be Italian even if he is born here because he is Muslim and he will follow the Islamic law. (Franco, comment to a post, 17 December 2014, emphasis in original)

This comment shows the anti-Islamic attitude of many Italians, who consider Muslims to be ‘foreigners’. Yalla’s female bloggers often address the problem of being considered ‘non-Italian’ because of their veils. The blogger Sabrina Mandouh, for example, describes her negative experience in voting for national elections after having obtained citizenship: the fact that she wears a headscarf made the scrutineer question her right to vote, saying: ‘How can you be Italian, if you are Muslim?’ (26 May 2014).

Yalla’s bloggers believe that facilitating the process of acquiring Italian citizenship would be an important step towards countering these xenophobic attitudes. The bloggers drafted a proposal for jus soli temperato (tempered jus soli), according to which citizenship would be accorded to children born in Italy after they complete compulsory education. Yalla’s proposal constitutes not only a way of simplifying the naturalization process, but also a strategy for situating the bloggers within Italian culture: they feel Italian because they have participated in a process of education and schooling that made them culturally Italian. With these discourses, the bloggers implicitly criticize migrants who refuse to learn Italian and embrace Italian culture as they themselves do.

The reform of Italy’s citizenship laws has a double meaning for Yalla. On the one hand, it challenges the xenophobic idea that Islam is incompatible with Italianness; on the other hand, the bloggers’ willingness to obtain citizenship shows that not only have they grown up in Italy, they have also undergone a process of integration that has led them to fully accept and love the country – a process that has made them as Italian as their Catholic peers.

Conclusion

Yalla aids the negotiation of hybrid Muslim identities by challenging the stereotype of a monolithic Islam. Yalla is a ‘third space’ because it exists between the private experiences of Muslim Italians and the public perception of Islam, and because it enables bloggers to discuss religious matters beyond traditional authorities. Yalla’s bloggers articulate their identities in a third space that is neither their culture of origin nor the Italian culture, but rather a hybrid space that is inclusive for both. The articulation of hybrid Muslim identities on the Internet is relevant for two main reasons.

First, Yalla describes these hybrid identities as double identities, richer identities which have the potential to improve Italian culture and society. The bloggers express this concept through the description of strategies for overcoming their marginalization within Italian society and normalizing the experience of being Muslim in Italy. By presenting themselves as religiously similar to their Catholic peers, the bloggers paint an unthreatening model of Islam that is compatible with Western values. The bloggers’ critical reflection on religious practices and behaviours enables them to move beyond dichotomies. By telling stories of social integration and solidarity they refuse to be criminalized as ‘bad Arabs’, and by reiterating their educational and professional achievements they equally refuse to be victimized as ‘poor migrants’. Yalla’s identities subvert dominant narrations of Islam by presenting religion and ethnicity as cultural potentials rather than marks of marginalization. Yalla tells stories of second-generations that can not only unproblematically reconcile their Muslim and Italian identities, but whose hybridity allows for a better understanding of multiple cultural, religious, and linguistic codes.

Second, the blog format is crucial in articulating Muslim hybrid identities. Yalla cannot aspire to the same audience as mainstream media, and so it employs a digital space to provide an alternative voice and create a community of readers. In addition, the bloggers use the Internet for its creative potential. Their hybrid identities principally exist in offline spaces and in private spaces of everyday experiences; because a blog allows for a storytelling style, it enables these experiences and identities to be transposed into the public space, where they can be read and reflected upon. In this way, the bloggers gain agency to select certain narratives over others and reappropriate their right to define their own experiences, even if they do not constitute attractive content material for mainstream media discourses. As Echchaibi (2009: 23) writes, ‘[t]he ability to tell your story on your own terms in this case reflects a capacity to challenge a social order by countering its exclusive rights to define your image and identity’. Indeed, while not the only venue of identity articulation, the Internet represents a space where the bloggers can enhance, amplify, and communicate the Muslim identities that exist in offline spaces.

Yalla’s ability to find strategies for overcoming marginalization and using the Internet as a space for storytelling has the potential to send a powerful message to Italian society. Branca usually encourages the bloggers by saying: ‘Don’t tell anything special, you are a message, the fact that you exist is a message because people don’t know you exist’ (personal communication, May 31, 2015). By showing their community of readers that Muslims who have found strategies for adapting their religious principles to their Western lives do indeed exist, Yalla’s bloggers send the implicit message that Italian society needs to acknowledge the presence of Muslim Italians as a resource rather than a threat. This message is political in the sense that it indirectly advocates for social change by creating ‘disruptive flows of dissent’, subverting the dominant narrative of incompatibility between Islam and the West. In doing so, the digital storytelling of hybrid Muslim identities shows that lived experiences can be more explanatory than political and mainstream media discourses against Islam.