Talk Islam

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  johnpi 1:25 am on March 5, 2010 | 12 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: blogger activism (6), blogger ethics (5), bloggers (59), blogging, converts (13), Muslim bloggers (15)

  Willow wrote:

  There is clearly something deeper going on that you’re worried about or have doubts about

  You are correct about being troubled, specifically, spiritually troubled. This response is to Aziz too. Abu Noor, I think you’ve been reading too much of Umar’s long goodbye and seem to be stuck on the notion of ‘progressive devils’ being a fifth column of something or other…

  When I first exchanged some emails with Aziz and he invited me to blog here, I told him that I had been closely following TI for some time, but I hadn’t really engaged or participated because I wasn’t in a very good headspace, I was somewhat angry about some of my conversion experiences, and I didn’t want to engage poorly or from a bad place (I was also upset about how some orthodox problem-solving seemed to create dysfunction in modern life – Islam should give us all the tools we need to succeed anywhere at any time). I was particularly upset about feeling ’silenced’ (don’t ask disrespectful questions) and how – internally – that imbued those questions or concerns with more power and interest than they probably merited just from being bottled up. The initial blogging I did was helpful for deflating that material and kind of getting it out of the way, and it was at about that point that I started blogging here.

  I’ve continued to use the blogging to try to ‘process’ what comes in from the dunya and from other Muslim perspectives and communities, but I think that what may be happening is that in driving myself up against every point of contention in the media and every point of seeming incoherence within the ummah and within Islam, that it’s having an unhealthy spiritual effect, and I’m falling back into that bad headspace again, or at least not a very good space in which to be engaging other Muslims.

  So I need to take a break from being a media junkie, abstain from the blogging and find other diversions for awhile. Finding more and new Muslim community offline in another context might be a good idea too.

  To try to sum up the point, I do believe it’s a matter of spiritual integrity not to ignore the world and what’s happening in it if it challenges your faith or your practice, but wading out into this stuff day after day – seeking it out – for too long is also bad for your spiritual health.

  So I’m going to dial my blogging way back for a bit…

   

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  johnpi 9:11 am on December 16, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: anonymous blogging (4), arab blogs (3), blog content (3), blogger activism (6), blogger ethics (5), bloggers (59), bloggers and journalists (13), blogging, blogosphere (9), blogs (23), Muslim bloggers (15), Muslim blogs (8), Muslim children bloggers (4)

  Where are they now? A few blogs and bloggers mentioned in the last year:

  • “Dear God” – A nondenominational website where desperate or struggling people could post often disturbing ‘letters to God’ with a prayer and a description of their travails. Readers offer words of hope and encouragement. “Dear God” was put up for sale just before Thanksgiving.

  • “Hal786″ – A blog by a Muslim girl, one of several Muslim children bloggers mentioned on the site. ‘Hal’ most recently blogged about her hopes for the Copenhagen climate change conference. “I can’t wait to see what’s going to be done by the world leaders to help save our planet!”

  • “malekat_el7oriya” – A blog by a Muslim teen girl who was most recently blogging about racial profiling of men wearing the ghutra and agal (the red and white scarf that men wear on their head and the black band that holds it on).

  • “Mahaguru58″ – Zainol Abideen is writing about his own made-up word: ‘Blogodementia.’ “Isn’t it quite absurd to see some of our fellow bloggers resort to abusing the blogosphere…to spread slander and ill will through their blogs and websites on an almost daily basis?”

  Mr. Abideen, the ‘pro-tem president’ of the Muslim Bloggers Alliance in Malaysia, first came to attention for “abusing the blogosphere” with his racist rantings against the Royhinga and for his odd takfiring of poor Muslims. He has never retracted his comments nor apologized.

  • “The Arabist” – A blogger who proudly wears the title ‘State Department Arabist,’ a term used derisively and that became widespread in Washington DC when the neocons took over under the administration of George W Bush.

  The implication is that anyone who takes such interest in the region is inherently suspicious and must have “gone native.”

  He also defends the word from leftists who try to conflate it with Orientalism. The Arabist drew attention for his review of the book, “What’s Really Wrong With The Middle East.”

  More blog updates later…

   
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  johnpi 9:15 am on November 20, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: anti-blasphemy law (2), blasphemy (7), blogger activism (6), blogger ethics (5), bloggers (59), bloggers and journalists (13), blogging, censorship (44), jafis (22), Jafiwatch (7), Muslim bloggers (15), retaliation against bloggers (13), retaliation/attacks against bloggers and journalists (17), zainol abideen (2)

  The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission is investigating 71 cases of Internet abuse by disseminating false and lewed contents and contents that insult Islam.

  Information Communication and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim said out of the 71, eight had been acted upon under the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998 for defaming others.

  “One had pleaded guilty and fined RM10,000 and the court also imposed certain conditions on the accused, while seven are awaiting trial,” he said in reply to a question from Matulidi Jusoh (BN-Dungun) in the Dewan Rakyat today.
  ….

  He disclosed that the ministry had also taken action under Section 263 of the Act against seven websites which insulted Islam, namely http://www.syurga-islam.blogspot.com, http://www.faithfreedom.org, manatuhanallah.wordpress.com, adibahahmed.blogspot.com, surind.blogspot.com, tokbatinsenoi.blogspot.com and http://www.malaysia-today.net/2008/content/view/1252.

  One of the blogs is operated by Indian Malaysian atheist Surind Raj who was reported by ‘protem President of the Muslim Bloggers Alliance’ Zainol Abideen which prompted Raj’s supporters to launch an Internet campaign against Abideen. I can’t tell if this action against Raj is the result of Abideen’s complaint.

   
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  johnpi 11:05 am on November 12, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: blogger activism (6), bloggers (59), bloggers and journalists (13), blogging, islamsphere (34), Muslim bloggers (15), Muslim children bloggers (4)

  Someone should start an endowment to pay money to good Muslim bloggers like Umar Lee and Hijabman to ‘incentivize’ the perpetuation of good Muslim blogging.

  For critics of anonymous blogging, this would also ‘incentivize’ people coming out from behind their acronyms. Can’t write a check to an anonymous person…

   
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  willow 11:20 am on October 23, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: blogging, Brass Crescent Awards (14)

  Don’t forget! Today is the last day to nominate your favorite blogs for the Brass Crescent Awards. Make your voice heard.

   
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  johnpi 8:43 pm on October 7, 2009 | 26 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloggers (59), blogging, internet (46), marriage (62), Marriage in Islam (6)

  Another Muslim college student is blogging his marriage search. Last year, I recall reading a blog of a different young man who was blogging his marriage search. I found his blog through a Muslim woman’s blog who was posting about her experiences moving toward – and then away from – a potential.

  I wonder how prevalent it is among young Muslim prospectives to blog the “single and looking” experience?

  Anyway, here’s an excerpt:

  The parents went for the initial meet and they said she was extremely impressive. Good marriage material.

  They told me about the girl and the family and it all looked promising.

  So, we arranged a date and we went to see the family. Initial impressions, the parents were extremely quiet and as the conversation progressed it seems they’ve lived an extremely sheltered life and imposed that lifestyle on their daughters.

  The conversation progressed and a revelation was then made, the girl wasn’t even aware of the marriage. Okay . . They continued and told me she would obey everything I say or do. I sit, she sits – Great . . a doormat!

  I couldn’t talk to her because her father thinks that daughters who speak to their potential husbands in front of their mahram are the bad girls. This comment threw me off.

  Another day passed. Another experience gained.

   
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  thabet 5:40 am on October 4, 2009 | 3 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloggers (59), blogging, fail, media (408)

  Emel, British Muslim ‘lifestyle’ magazine, had a feature on Muslim bloggers. They appear to have failed with the front cover for at least one of the bloggers they featured, Indigo Jo:

  (More …)

   
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  johnpi 9:33 am on September 11, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: blog (6), blog content (3), blogger ethics (5), bloggers (59), blogging, Egypt (94), Muslim bloggers (15)

  Bloggers in Egypt are now being arrested for not moderating comments on their blog posts.

  There is a question of blogging ethics here, in that an anonymous commenter launched into a personal attack against an employee of a company mentioned in the blogger’s story. The employee was not a public figure. The blogger eventually said “that he will delete them [the comments] because the attack is personal and unfounded.”

   
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  johnpi 6:25 pm on August 18, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloggers (59), blogging, meta (66), Muslim bloggers (15)

  Teh awesome blog post of the day: How to gain a following and potentially win a Brass Crescent Award.

  I am vaguely calling you out

  Bowers writes:
  This is a message for all you Chicken Littles, you handwringers, you wannabe strategists, you people who have suggestions or doubts: I am vaguely calling you out.

  Who you are is not really important. Why I am vaguely calling you out is also not important. In fact, it is better that both “you,” and what you are doing, are never really defined. This has three advantages:

  First, it’s easy. As long as both you and your actions stay open-ended and amorphous, you can potentially be as many people I don’t like as possible without actually being anyone at all. This way, I win a huge argument with a lot of people, without actually engaging in an argument with anyone at all.

  Second, it allows as many people as possible to identify with me calling you out. Everyone is angry at something someone wrote on the Internets, so the emotional need to call someone out on the Internets is widespread. When someone reads and recommends this diary, they can also join in the please of vaguely calling someone out for doing something. Now, I have a following.

  Third, it prevents me from ever having to justify my calling you out. If I was specific in who I was calling out, it is possible that their written record would contradict my vague reasons for doing so. That would suck, so I am not taking any chances. This way, I can never lose.

  Click here to read entire article.

   
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  johnpi 11:01 pm on August 13, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloggers (59), blogging, blogosphere (9), blogs (23), Muslim blogs (8), Syria (25)

  In Syria, the blogging community has self-organized a competition to determine the best Syrian blogs, which are primarily written in either Arabic or English. However, one blogger protested one of the conditions for being considered in the contest:

  This is a commendable effort on their part if it’s indeed intended to honor outstanding Syrian blogs, encourage and support a blogging culture and expose the role of blogs in the making and shaping of a civil society in Syria. However, if you read the 5th and last condition for blogs to be accepted in the competition, this is what you’ll find (translated word by word): the contents of which [the submitted blog] must not dissent from the accepted mores and morals (i.e. sex through videos or photos, hostility to religions, cussing, swearing and bad taste). Do I take it that it is acceptable for a blog to attack trans-dressers but not Sheikhs and priests? Or, for the sake of argument, is a photo of a random cloud in the sky in the shape of an eye and a comment underneath that this is the eye of God acceptable but not another photo of a woman’s perfect behind with the apt remark that this butt is an elegant example of the splendor of creation (if we’re so inclined to believe)?

  Eventually, the offending condition was removed.

   
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  thabet 5:37 am on August 3, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloggers (59), blogging, Catholic (5), interfaith (50), liberal protestant, religion (365)

  Theo Hobson draws the ire of Damien Thompson over his claim that Charles Moore, a former editor of The Spectator, is suffering from a martyr’s complex over his spat with BBC. Hobson says Moore’s complaint is related to the former Speccie editor’s conversion to Catholicism.

  I am loath to agree with Thompson on anything, but some of Hobson’s stuff does look like cheap shots at Catholic beliefs; look at this for example.

  But I don’t understand why Thompson is complaining about Hobson using his Spectator blog to peddle his ’second-rate religious commentary’; Thompson regularly uses his Telegraph blog to promote his own second-rate political and religious commentary, even peddling outright lies about Muslims. Thompson could learn a thing or two from his co-blogger and one of the Telegraph’s leader writers, Christopher Howse, who has at least appears to have read a book or two on Islamic history, faith and practice.

   
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  thabet 10:54 pm on August 2, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: anti-arab racism (5), bloggers (59), blogging, Fanatical Defenders Of The Only Democracy In The Middle (18), Hamas (53), hasbara (6), islamophobia (228), propaganda (47)

  Sky’s foreign affairs editor Tim Marshall is hacked off with fanatical pro-Israeli (or should that be anti-Arab?) blogs repeating the lie that Hamas held a mass wedding of ‘child brides’. He had a series of tweets about this last night, ending with the following:

  Is having several beers to calm down – and not succeeding. Most websites repeating this lie are members only – and i aint joinin to post

  Heathlander has more.

   
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  johnpi 8:38 pm on July 16, 2009 | 2 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: blogger ethics (5), blogging, blogs (23), blogsphere (10), Muslim blogs (8)

  Blogger ethics; specifically, the ethics of removing something from your blog after publishing it (obviously related to the previous post).

  (More …)

   
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  johnpi 8:47 pm on July 7, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloggers and journalists (13), blogging, blogosphere (9), internet (46), Internet vs print media (5), journalism (44)

  Studies in arrogance.

  Barry Diller’s perspective on blogging typifies the response of many a complacent media executive to the rise of blogging, according to Scott Rosenberg.

  “Self-publishing by someone of average talent is not very interesting,” he told The Economist in 2006. “Talent is the new limited resource.” At a technology conference that year, he declared, “There’s just not that much talent in the world, and talent almost always outs.”

  Diller’s view echoes that of avowedly elitist polemics like Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur.” According to this perspective, talent is a resource of fixed supply. The existing institutions of the publishing and broadcast world are already doing an efficient and thorough job of finding all that talent and giving it a platform. And all this other stuff that’s spewing forth from the Web’s profusion of blogs and podcasts and videos? It’s just dross that obscures the real talent’s output.

  Real Nietzschian supermen in the fields of journalism and political and social commentary don’t float to the top while maintaining a presence in the blogosphere, so if you’re ambitious you better get out of this guy’s cone of condescension and ditch the blogging.

  In related news, Dan Froomkin, recently fired columnist for the Washington Post has been hired to be the Huffington Post’s Washington bureau chief.

   
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  thabet 12:18 am on June 26, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloggers (59), blogging, immigration (51), integration (15), islamophobia (228), media (408), Multiculturalism (44), right-wing (96), united kingdom (733)

  Alex Massie writes a thinly-veiled attack on his co-blogger, Mad Mel.

   
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  johnpi 9:47 pm on June 17, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloggers (59), blogging, internet (46), Internet activists (10), iran (366)

  How cyberwarriors are foiling Iran’s information crackdown.

  Author Austin Heap has been a prominent American activist in helping Iranians continue to communicate despite government efforts to prevent it. He has also set up tools to attack government propaganda websites.

  Now, less than 24 hours later, I am receiving more than 2,000 simultaneous connections per second from Iran. When I wake up, I will have received more than 300 e-mails from volunteers trying to contribute and lighting the path forward for a movement that is both new and old.

  Americans ignored the subversion of their democracy. When a people better than us stood up to secure theirs, I could not let them down. The revolution may not be televised, but it will be tweeted.

   
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  johnpi 5:37 am on June 17, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloggers (59), blogging, internet (46), Internet activists (10)

  Social hacktivism and the social denial of service (SDoS).

  Also check out the “people’s information warfare concept” and various recent examples of it in action.

  The recently discussed “people’s information warfare” concept highlighting China’s growing interest in the idea, is a great example of a culture of participation orbiting around hacktivism cause, a culture we’ve also seen in many other hacktivism tensions in the past, and will continue to see in the future. The entire concept is relying on the fact that the collective bandwidth of people voluntarily “donating” it, is far more efficient from a “malicious economies of scale” perspective, compared to for instance the botnet masters having to create the botnet by infecting users in one way or another.

   
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  johnpi 7:05 pm on June 16, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloggers (59), blogging, internet (46), Internet activists (10), iran (366), retaliation/attacks against bloggers and journalists (17)

  Cyberwar guide for beginners and other cool stuff.

  More and more of Iran’s pro-government websites are under assault, as opposition forces launch web attacks on the Tehran regime’s online propaganda arms….

  San Francisco technologist Austin Heap has put together a set of instructions on how to set up “proxies” — intermediary internet protocol (IP) address — that allow activists to get through the government firewall. And the Networked Culture blog has assembled for pro-democracy sympathizers a “cyberwar guide for beginners.” Stop publicizing these proxies over Twitter, the site recommends. Instead, send direct messages to @stopAhmadi or @iran09 and they will distributed them discretely [sic] to bloggers in Iran.”

   
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  johnpi 9:17 pm on June 15, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloggers (59), blogging, internet (46), Internet activists (10), iran (366)

  ‘Denial of Service’ attack success update: Posted one hour ago to the Facebook page, an image of Dolatyar.ir page, which has gone down for the first time.

   
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  johnpi 12:24 pm on June 15, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloggers (59), blogging, internet (46), Internet activists (10), iran (366)

  Another mass ‘denial of service’ attack tool for zapping propaganda outlets, per request of ‘persiankiki’ and many, many others…

   
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  johnpi 6:13 am on June 15, 2009 | 6 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloggers (59), blogging, internet (46), Internet activists (10)

  An advocate for mass ‘denial of service’ attacks on Iranian Internet propaganda outlets is inviting you to participate:

  I would never recommend such an attack on domestic servers or those intended for honest, ethical purposes. I’m also not officially recommending an attack on the state-run news websites in Iran. I am, however, informing you that users on Twitter are spreading a way to take down such websites that spread propaganda for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his illegitimate government.

  How? By using a web application called Page Reboot. Page Reboot automatically reloads a website of your choice every time you’ve programmed it to. So let’s say we want to take down Fars News, which is a mouth-piece in Iran for the government. We would enter the url and set it to reload every second. It will then request the website every one second, overloading the servers and shutting out the website. You can use the service on multiple websites at once by opening multiple tabs.

  Follow the link to get suggestions for the best sites to attack. Could it really be so simple?

   
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  johnpi 6:50 pm on June 8, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloggers (59), blogging, blogs (23)

  Interview with popular Lebanese “youth blogger” Maya Zankoul.

  Youth broadly defined – Maya is 22.

  Maya Zankoul, a 22-year-old graphic designer from the southern village of Hasbaya, had had it with work one day when she decided to let out her frustration on an online blog. She drew sketches of her ideas spontaneously, unaware that the images posted on her blog also conveyed grievances shared by the youth of the country.

  Zankoul grew up in Saudi Arabia and attended college in the US where she graduated from Notre Dame University. She moved to Lebannon in 2005. She says of her new country:

  We live in the same city and country and go through similar experience… We face the same problems on the road, at home, everywhere. Dealing with Lebanese people is also not easy because most of them have a certain mentality. I learned this mentality when I moved here. There is religious, political and social narrow-mindedness. People want to know your name to figure out your background and then be able to judge you. This really bothers me.

  Below, a panel from a drawing on her blog decrying the “porn-oriented” public street advertisements of Lebanon.

  

   
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  johnpi 5:39 pm on May 30, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloggers (59), blogging, blogoma, blogosphere (9), Maghreb, maghrib (2), morocco (14), Muslim blogs (8)

  Moroccan blogosphere’s rapid growth.

  There were not that many bloggers just a few years ago. Today, their number is estimated at about 30,000 to 40,000 bloggers according to Moroccan blogger Larbi. All topics are covered from politics to arts, to daily life and fashion, music and sports.

  The Moroccan blogosphere also has its own name – the Blogoma, which is a contraction between Blogosphere and Marocaine (Moroccan)

  Many languages are used in the Moroccan blogs. If French was the most significant one used, there are now more blogs written in Arabic and in English. Indeed, some blogs are capitalizing on the lack of Moroccan Arabic-speaking blogs and have declared that their purpose is to promote the use of Arabic while blogging.

  Here’s an Arabic blog Bla faransiyya (“without French”).

  Two new multi-author blogs for the Maghreb region written in English are the Maghreb Politics Review and the Maghreb blog.

   
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  johnpi 9:11 am on May 29, 2009 | 2 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Adventures in blogging with the US military (3), bloggers (59), blogging, freedom of speech (71), journalism (44), journalists (17), Muslim bloggers (15), retaliation/attacks against bloggers and journalists (17), US military (60)

  Pentagon plans new arm to wage wars in cyberspace.

  The US military is stepping up preparations to conduct both offensive and defensive computer warfare. I guess if we get too uppity here at Talk Islam, we might be in trouble.

   
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  thabet 1:56 pm on May 25, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloggers (59), blogging, media (408), not silencing, religion (365), ruth gledhill

  I’ve just come across a (new?) blog, Reading Ruth Gledhill, set up to critique (not silence) Ruth Gledhill, The Times’ religion correspondent.

   
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  thabet 1:34 pm on May 23, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: barclay brothers, bloggers (59), blogging, politics (766), united kingdom (733)

  This is an example of silencing bloggers. (Even if they’re dimwitted Tory MPs they don’t deserve to be threatened by lawyers like this.)

   
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  johnpi 6:50 am on April 23, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: blogging, facebook (11), protest movements (9)

  Facebook is a lousy platform to organize political action in authoritarian countries.

  I have a hard time thinking of a communications technology more poorly suited for organizing high-risk political collective action than Facebook….Its public nature makes it easy for the authorities to identify leaders to repress, or for provocateurs or spies to join up and see what’s in the works. And finally, Facebook – with its brief Twittery status updates and forum-ish discussion threads – offers less of the ‘public sphere’ potential of blogs.

   
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  thabet 4:34 am on April 2, 2009 | 2 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloggers (59), blogging, blogs (23), tinternet (15)

  Something for the people behind blog prizes to think about…

   
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  thabet 2:12 am on March 21, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloggers (59), blogging, crap comedians, right-wing (96), the daily torygraph (2)

  I see the Torygraph has reduced itself to hiring James Littlepole for some cheap gags in the hope of a few more hits.

  (Via Back Towards The Locus.)

   
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  thabet 1:21 am on March 14, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloggers (59), blogging, media (408), the daily wail (5)

  Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads, the brains behind the excellent The Sun Lies blog, has revamped the Mail Watch blog which keeps an eye on the other well known peddlers of lies and half-truths in the British press.