A strange report on “Islamic blogs”

Sheila Musaji

Posted Mar 27, 2010      •Permalink      • Printer-Friendly Version
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A strange report on “Islamic blogs”

by Sheila Musaji

A rather strange report came out recently.  It was a British Home Office document, titled Estimating Network Size and Tracking Information Dissemination among Islamic Blogs

The first article I came across on this report was titled “Top 20 most influential Islamic blogs named by counterror officials”.  It simply listed the top 20 sites in the report with a few brief notes about each site.

Reading the list puzzled me, as it is a real hodge-podge of totally unrelated sites which contains out of date information on some sites that are offline, or no longer updated.  There are a few sites that contain political content, but others are sites on Sufism and spirituality or personal blogs about daily life.  There are sites that are relatively popular, and sites that get an insignificant amount of traffic.  Bloggers are included who are not Muslim, or whose site content is not even particularly focused on anything to do with Islam, and some that are simply news aggregates from the mainstream press.  Some of the sites might be labeled conservative and some quite progressive, but only one actual actual extremist site (Islamic Thinkers Society), one possibly extremist site, and one that there is no way to check out if you are not willing to log in, as the content is restricted (Maqasid).  Basically, this is a collection of sites that have nothing in common.

Some of these sites I know well, some I respect highly, one I despise, and some I had never heard of before.  I decided to look into this a little and found a few more articles that upped the ante.

A Guardian article calls these the most influential political bloggers  The article also states:  “The project is primarily concerned with how “radical Islamic messages” are disseminated in Britain, yet it notes that many blogs are not overtly or mainly political in this sense, but contain such messages or references to them.    It says a large anti-jihadist and anti-Islamic blogging community exists which is far larger and more cohesive than the pro-Islamic blogging community.” 

Does that suggest that these 20 sites are pro-jihadist?  Is there a suggestion here that pro-Islamic and pro-Islamist are the same thing?  Or that pro-Islamic is the opposite of anti-Jihadist?  That is ludicrous.  Do they really believe that all of these are “influential”?

Ashish Ray in an article in The Times of India makes some alarming comments“The Home Office on Tuesday also shortlisted 20 extremist political bloggers.” ...  “The top five extremist sites are said to be: Ali Eteraz, Islam in Europe, Angry Arab News Service, Indigo Jo Blogs/Blogistan and Daily Terror.”
 
So we have now gone from the 20 most influential Islamic blogs to Islamic political blogs, to Islamic “extremist political bloggers”.  This is pure spin, and can only be seen as an attempt to jump on the Islamophobia bandwagon.  Is any Muslim writing about anything (including poetry, cats, or humor) supposed to be a potential threat just because they identify themselves as Muslims?

The only accurate word used in any of this might be “blog” as these sites do allow comments and so are interactive.

Here are the blogs listed as the most influential.  In most cases, I will simply give the link to the website so that you can read for yourself and see for yourself that these are not only mainstream, but anti-jihadist sites.  In a few cases I will provide some background information in addition to the link to the site so that you can see how distorted, irrelevant, and incoherent this list is.

Whatever the researchers were paid for this drivel, the money was totally wasted.  Jay Leno does a “dumb criminals” segment.  If he ever decides to do a “dumb academics” segment, this is one for his files.

1) Ali Eteraz (no longer online)

Ali Eteraz’ blog is no longer online.  He is now a regular at the Comment is Free section of The Guardian.  Here is a list of his current articles.  Ali Eteraz, born in Lahore in 1980, was raised in Dominican Republic, Pakistan and the United States.    A graduate of Emory University (High Honors in Philosophy) and Temple Law, his first prose work, Children of Dust, was published in 2009. It was called “compelling” by the Washington Post, and O: The Oprah Magazine, chose it for its Fall Reading List. It was also listed among the 2009 Books of the Year by New Statesman and has been translated into Italian.

2) Islam in Europe - http://islamineurope.blogspot.com/

Indigo Jo #4 posted an article about this report in which he points out a number of flaws in the report including the fact that Islam in Europe “is obviously not run by a Muslim and is not exactly “pro-Islamic” in my observation either.”

3) Angry Arab News Service http://angryarab.blogspot.com/

The Angry Arab #  is run by an atheist who wonders on his site “do I have legal basis for suing the Home Office for the fallacious labeling of my site? Please advise.”    As Brian Whitaker points out “But look more closely and you’ll find that the man identified in the report as Britain’s third most influential “pro-Islamic” blogger is actually an atheist based in the United States. As’ad AbuKhalil, a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University who blogs as The Angry Arab is furious about it. “How ignorant are the researchers of the Home Office?” he writes. “How many times does one have to espouse atheist, anarchist, and secular principles before they realise that their categorisation is screwed up?”    He suspects that his blog was included because of its name. He rarely talks about religion on his blog, except when mocking the fatwas issued by reactionary clerics.”

4) Indigo Jo Blogs http://www.blogistan.co.uk/blog/

5) The Daily Terror http://www.bayyinat.org.uk/terror.htm

The Daily Terror is not a blog, but a listing of news items from mainstream press primarily - the author Yunus Yakub Islam does blog at AHOTU http://muslimanarchist.wordpress.com/ where he posted his take on this report 

6) Yahya Birt http://www.yahyabirt.com/

Yahya Birt’s Musings on the Britannic Crescent blog hasn’t been updated since September 2009.  He is an academic, a research fellow at the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, director of City Circle, an organisation for Muslim professionals, Editor of the Muslim World Book Review and is undertaking a doctorate in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford, looking at the developments in Muslim youth movements in the United Kingdom. 

7)  Mujahideen Ryder   http://www.mujahideenryder.net/ 

Has stopped blogging since Dec. 2009

8) Rolled Up Trousers http://www.osamasaeed.org/osama/

A blog by Osama Saeed - here’s his bio:  Osama Saeed is one of Scotland’s foremost peace activists and human rights campaigners.    He has been listed as one of Scotland’s Top 100 thinkers and opinion formers by the Scotsman newspaper, one of the country’s “Brightest and Best” by the Sunday Herald, and has been described as Scotland’s most influential Muslim by the Sunday Times. He is a prominent media commentator and has appeared on BBC, SKY, CNN, Al-Jazeera and others. He has had articles published in the Guardian, Sunday Herald, Daily Mail and Scotsman newspapers.    After the Glasgow Airport terrorist attack in 2007, Osama organised what is considered the first ever Muslim organised demonstration against Al-Qaeda terrorism anywhere in the world. He played a central role in the movement against the Iraq war, and spoke at the historic demonstration of February 15th 2003.    He is an alumnus of the US State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program, and is currently CEO of an NGO.    Osama was born in Glasgow’s Yorkhill Hospital and was brought up in the city. He wishes to put his talents and experience to serving the people of Glasgow Central as their MP at the next General Election. Osama is married with two children.

9) Ijtema http://www.ijtema.net/

last post on Ijtema was Dec 2009

10) Saifuddin http://wasalaam.wordpress.com/

Saifuddin is a Naqshbandi Sufi site which discusses primarily spirituality, prayer, etc.

11) The White Path http://www.thewhitepath.com/

white path primarily about Turkish politics  

12) Gardens of Paradise http://shadows15.wordpress.com/

Not updated since May 2009.  According to a National Post Toronto article the site “features letters by two of the Toronto 18 terror suspects, an al-Qaeda propaganda video that calls fighting “obligatory” for Muslims and several of Al-Awlaki’s video and audio statements.”  The article also identifies the anonymous blogger as Mohamed Elmi Ibrahim who maintained the blog until May of 2009 when he is thought to have left for Somalia.  I did a search of the site which is still online although not updated, and I did find an article about al Awlaki’s release from prison in Yemen which contained links to some of al Awlaki’s talks which was posted in Dec. 2007, so whether it was before or after al Awlaki became radicalized - who knows? Someone would have to investigate this further, but all a cursory survey of the site shows is that this MAY BE an extremist site. 

13) Ahmed’s World of Islam http://ahmed2004uk.blogspot.com/

Offline since October 2008.  The author now blogs at http://www.haqislam.org/ 

14) Unique Muslimah http://uniquemuslimah.wordpress.com/

Unique Muslimah not even slightly political - just a personal blog with stories about cats, gardens, etc.  The two articles on the front page currently are about cats (with lots of photos of said cats), and the lengthiest article is about the author’s attempt to make friends with a neighbors semi-wild calico kitten and how rewarding it was to finally succeed.  If this is extremism, then God help us all.

15) AE http://alternativeentertainment.wordpress.com/

This is an alternative entertainment site?

16) Knowledge Seeker http://adnant.wordpress.com/

Site hasn’t been updated since August 2009, last post was a beautiful poem.

17) Imam Johari http://www.imamjohari.com/Imam_Johari/Make_It_Plain__Podcast/Make_It_Plain__Podcast.html 

Imam Johari Abdul Malik is known nationally for his fundraising efforts for masjids, schools and relief organizations.  He is a founding member of the Muslim Advocacy Commission of Washington, D.C. and “Muslim Men Against Domestic Violence” [MMADV] and has edited a book on “What Islam Says About Domestic Violence”.  Imam Johari and along with Rev. Graylan Hagler started the “Ramadan Feed-the-Needy” Interfaith Program in Washington, DC feeding over 100 hundred homeless women of all faiths nightly during the fasting period of Ramadan.

18) Sheikhy Notes http://adnant.wordpress.com/

19) Islamic Thinkers Society

TAM has discussed these people in two articles [1] and [2].  Yusuf Smith of Indigo Jo warned about their leader back in 2005.  This is an extremist site, and it is an insult to these other sites to be included in the same report.  Fortunately, they are not only a handful of individuals, but their site gets almost no traffic, and the only press they get is negative.

20) MAQASID - requires login, no way to find out anything about them otherwise.

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