The most unusual and unexpected Muslim blogging community: Muslim children. In my own conception of the online ‘Islamsphere’, I don’t think of Muslim children as being a part of it, but they are as I keep running across Islam-focus blogs being published by kids who may not be in junior high school yet. Obviously, this is a development limited to the economic class of Muslims who have computers or have enough money to give their children computers.
Aside from questions of parental due diligence, and whether children should even be online in this manner, such blogs give us an insight into minds of the next generation of Muslims when their topics stray out of the realm of childish concerns – though we need to be able to put aside our inherent adult bias against childish modalities of communication to listen. Hal786 for example, was concerned about suicide and depression among nonMuslims and was motivated to Dawah activism among them. And this girl had a complaint about the lack of images of ‘action hijabis’ online.
Anecdotally, all of the Muslim children’s blogs I’ve stumbled across so far have been published by girls, and I have no idea why such a phenomenon might be ‘gendered.’ But one could certainly imagine that children with blogs are getting early practice on expressing themselves and community building. To the extent that any are motivated to engage in online activism, as adults they may be more likely to move on to other forms of off-line activism and community leadership.
