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Muslims and the media in the blogosphere

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Abstract

In the past two decades a virtual Ummah has evolved in cyberspace. While some of these websites are targeted specifically at Muslims, others attempt to provide outreach on Islam or counter Islamophobic bias. As noted by Jon Anderson, in his pioneering work on Islam in cyberspace, Muslims were among the first engineering students to create websites at the dawn of the Internet, before mainstream Islamic organizations posted official websites. There is a wealth of material by Muslims in English and Western languages, some of it archived for research. This article explores the methodological problems posed in studying the range of Islam-content blogs, from private individuals to religious scholars, as well as Muslim websites that feature comments from readers. The focus of the paper is an analysis of blogs about Islam or by Muslims that either act as watchdogs on the media or try to provide alternative views to the mainstream media of competing Muslim groups. Researching these blogs as a form of e-ethnography calls for a rethinking and refining of anthropological methodology as e-ethnography.

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Notes

  1. For details on the history of the Internet, see Hobbes’ Internet Timeline, http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/. Accessed April 4, 2009.

  2. Taken from the website Internet World Stats, http://www.internetworldstats.com/. Accessed April 4, 2009.

  3. Technorati, State of the Blogosphere Report, http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/ Accessed April 4, 2009.

  4. http://perseus.com/survey/news/release_blogs.html. Accessed June 30, 2008.

  5. http://ilmcentral.hadithuna.com/. Accessed July 2, 2008.

  6. http://ilana.hadithuna.com/. Accessed July 2, 2008.

  7. http://maniacmuslim.com/. Accessed July 2, 2008.

  8. http://ahmadiyya.org/WordPress/. Accessed July 2, 2008.

  9. http://ahmadiyya.org/WordPress/2008/06/05/blog-resumption/. Accessed July 2, 2008.

  10. http://www.alislam.org/. Accessed July 2, 2008.

  11. The persecution of the Ahmadiyya community is archived online at http://www.thepersecution.org/. Accessed July 2, 2008.

  12. http://www.alhafeez.org/rashid/. Accessed July 2, 2008.

  13. http://gaymuslims.wordpress.com/. Accessed July 2, 2008.

  14. http://www.muslimhiphop.com/forum/index.php?act=home. Accessed April 5, 2009.

  15. http://www.joelstrumpet.com/. Accessed April 5, 2009.

  16. The urls for these, respectively, are http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/, http://usastopshariah.wordpress.com/, and http://www.thememriblog.org/. Accessed April 5, 2009.

  17. The blog is at http://ayaanhirsiali.web-log.nl/ayaanhirsiali/. The MySpace page is http://www.myspace.com/ayaanhirsiali. Accessed April 5, 2009.

  18. http://www.freewebs.com/unoffibnwarraq/index.htm. Accessed April 5, 2009.

  19. http://persecutedchurch.blogspot.com/2009/01/saudi-blogger-arrested-site-blocked.html. Accessed April 5, 2009.

  20. http://tabsir.net/?page_id=672. Accessed April 5, 2009.

  21. http://www.jihadwatch.org/. Accessed July 2, 2008.

  22. http://www.islamophobia-watch.com. Accessed July 2, 2008.

  23. http://kashmiri-nomad.blogspot.com/. Accessed July 11, 2008. The blogger is self-described as: ‘Born in Kashmir, raised and educated in Western Europe. I presently live somewhere west of the Bosphorus and east of the Rocky Mountains,’ adding that his interest is in ‘Passing comments regarding things I may not necessarily be an expert about.’ Since November 1, 2006 this blog had received about 45,000 visitors by July 8, 2008.

  24. http://kashmiri-nomad.blogspot.com/2008/07/exposed-how-parts-of-british-media-want.html. Accessed July 11, 2008.

  25. http://kashmiri-nomad.blogspot.com/2008/07/tolerant-westerners-strike-desecrate.html. Accessed July 11, 2008.

  26. http://uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=42417. Accessed April 5, 2009.

  27. His main Arabic blog is at http://karam903.blogspot.com/. A petition to obtain his release is posted online at http://campaigns.aicongress.org/?id=Kareem. Accessed April 5, 2009

  28. http://www.freekareem.org/. Accessed April 5, 2009.

  29. http://muslimahmediawatch.blogspot.com/2008/07/salaam-and-hello.html. Accessed July 11, 2008.

  30. http://muslimahmediawatch.blogspot.com/2007/08/salaam-waleykum-everyone.html. Accessed July 11, 2008.

  31. Comment on Talk Islam, http://talkislam.info/2009/03/14/i-dont-see-the-point-of-islamic-google/. Accessed April 5, 2009. The reference is to a Google search engine designed for Muslims, with search functions in English, French and Arabic.

  32. On April 5, 2009 the total number of hits for ‘muslim blog’ reached 22,400,000.

  33. Although the main search engine is in English, there are versions for over a hundred different languages. To gauge the popularity of Google’s search engine, it is worth noting that in May, 2008 there were 135,291,588 different people who used the service, according to the site analysis of Compete (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/google.com/?metric=uv#, accessed July 2, 2008).

  34. http://themuslimblog.blogspot.com/. Accessed April, 2008.

  35. http://blog.muxlim.com/?p=114. Accessed April, 2008.

  36. http://www.halaltube.com/halal-tube-on-facebook-myspace-and-twitter. Accessed April 5, 2009.

  37. http://www.tomsofmaine.com/press/press-releases.aspx?id=59&s4=1. Accessed April 5, 2009. The MySpace account of MR, however, on April 5, 2009 included an ad for a singles site called plentyoffish.com; it was definitely not halal.

  38. http://www.nisa78.blogspot.com/

  39. Consider this post for Tuesday, December 04, 2007 on the Indian Muslim blog, Oroosa’s Orbit: ‘Almost 5 months. Yes that’s a long period I kept away from my blog. I know there is no use maintaining a blog if you can’t update it. But...’ (http://oroosa.blogspot.com/2007/12/five-months.html, accessed July 2, 2008).

  40. A number of Muslims found the website offensive. In late 2004 it was hacked with death threats, as reported on the blog City of Brass (http://cityofbrass.blogspot.com/2004/12/cowards-hack-muslimwakeup.html). The Progressive Muslim Union is now disbanded, according to an entry in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Muslim_Union).

  41. Nassef already had his enemies in 2005, as the ephemeral website ‘Ahmed Nassef is Dajjal’ (http://nassefisdajjal.blogspot.com/) indicates.

  42. http://www.muhajabah.com/islamicblog/veiled4allah.php. Accessed July 2, 2008.

  43. For example, http://www.geocities.com/mutmainaa1/bloggers.html and http://www.anindianmuslim.com/2006/08/list-of-muslim-bloggers-from-india.html. Gary Bunt’s listing contains some blogs at http://virtuallyislamic.blogspot.com/. Accessed July 2, 2008.

  44. http://www.blogherald.com/2005/10/10/the-blog-herald-blog-count-october-2005/. Accessed July 2, 2008.

  45. The methodologies of modern anthropology, especially the role as both participant and observer in the field, are often conflated with the travel-through reflections of travelers, missionaries and journalists. The ethnographer does more than look in as an outside observer; this involves knowledge of the local language and dialect applied in a dialogic relationship with the people being studied.

  46. G. Schmidt (2006, 154) cites the example of a young female convert in Denmark, where given the lack of fellow Muslims she felt an intimate sense of community with women across national boundaries.

  47. There are, of course, virtual online communities with a Muslim presence, such as Second Life (Derrickson 2008).

  48. One of the bloggers on Muslimah Media Watch introduced herself by saying ‘And yup, I really am Muslim... don’t be fooled by the name.’ http://muslimahmediawatch.blogspot.com/2008/07/introduction.html. Accessed July 11, 2008.

  49. For a recent example of the combination of amateur blogging and concurrent e-ethnography of Iranian bloggers, see Doostdor (2004).

  50. http://www.juancole.com/. Accessed April 5, 2009. For an analysis of the early impact of this blog, see Drezner and Farrell (2004, 34–35).

  51. http://www.lamp.ac.uk/cis/liminal/index.htm. Accessed April 5, 2009.

  52. http://www.digitalislam.eu. Accessed April 5, 2009.

  53. http://www.agenceglobal.com/author.asp?type=2&id=2. Accessed April 5, 2009.

  54. http://wbeeman.blogspot.com/. Accessed April 5, 2009.

  55. http://www.tabsir.net. Accessed April 5, 2009.

  56. http://sciencereligionnews.blogspot.com/. Accessed April 5, 2009.

  57. Said wrote this seminal text before the advent of the Internet as we know it. For a survey of the issue of ‘Orient’ as an imaginary space post Said, see Varisco (2007a).

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Acknowledgments

This article has benefited from the stimulating discussion at the Workshop on Muslims and the Media, Princeton University, where it was first presented in May, 2008. I thank the participants, especially for the readings by Juliane Hammer and Roxanne Marcotte.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, 11550-1090, USA

    Daniel Martin Varisco

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Varisco, D.M. Muslims and the media in the blogosphere. Cont Islam 4, 157–177 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-009-0106-y

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