Five Talk Islam blog posts that have enduring high interest and have continued to draw readers to this blog.
From time to time as I blog for TI, I check in on the ‘Who’s Online’ link to see what stories are getting readership on the blog. ‘Who’s online’ doesn’t tell who is online but it does show when a post is being read by a ‘guest.’ The following seem to be the most frequently accessed. There is probably a more scientific tool to track this, but here are my impressions of posts that seem to be the most enduringly popular on the blog.
This post by Aziz from last year consistently draws hits. Abortion is an issue that is very controversial in the US, and has been the cause of domestic terrorism here. I suspected Christian activists who trawl the web to confront people on this issue, but there are a number of other posts on TI that mention abortion and I don’t know why this one stands out for attention.
Report from the UK: Exposing the UK Salafi’s Part 1.
The blogger Salafi Burnout was a former strident Salafi who turned whistleblower on movement leaders who were abusing their power. He had a lot of support from others who felt they had been mistreated or abused. And then one day Wordpress shut his blog down, and SB disappeared, refusing to even reply to email queries about what had happened to him. I don’t read Salafi blogs so I don’t know what’s out there, but so far as I know this is the only remaining story that was published on his blog and that is still accessible to the public.
Abdul-Basser is the Harvard Muslim chaplain. His email was highly controversial, and has prompted very divergent responses from different readers. I agreed with others who were circulating the email that it was licentious and permissive about directing violence at people who choose to renounce the deen. I felt that it was insufficient to meet the standard of responsible discourse that he limits it to a perogative of the Islamic state, because there are so many groups in the world who call themselves an ‘Islamic state.’ Abu Noor and Aziz felt he was only restating orthodox Muslim doctrine on apostasy. Abdul-Basser also came in for a lot of criticism for seeming to place concern for human rights outside the religion with his “hegemony of human rights” comment.
Rates of sexual abuse of India’s children shockingly high.
An article on child sexual abuse that says one out of every two people in India is a survivor – or currently a victim of – child sexual abuse. I pointed out that there are 150 million Muslims in India, which meant that there were a lot of Muslim sex abuse survivors out there. I speculated further that you could extrapolate that figure to the entirety of South Asia which brings many more Muslim victims into the picture. I expected this post to prompt derisive, scoffing or dismissive comments. Instead, its drawn a lot of hits. Is that silent acknowledgement of the extent of the problem?
