Although some of you may not realize it, one of the most popular brown “Mom & Pop” websites out there is alt.muslim.com, which was founded by a married Indian-American business student who grew up in California. From the Information Warfare Site:
“My name is Shahed Amanullah, and I created the Website altmuslim.com. I started the site because I wanted to see some more open dialogue and discussion and debate about things that are happening in the Muslim world.
“Before the Internet came around, Muslims lived in relative isolation and obscurity from each other. They never had to deal with Muslims of different colors, of different schools of thought, of different political persuasions. And when the Internet came about and these people had to find each other and see each other for the first time, it was really jarring. I mean, Muslim discourse on the Internet for the first several years was nothing but fiery debates and insults and things like that. Muslims need to learn together in cyberspace in a way that’s civil and respectful.
“Only now are people starting to get together as Sunni, Sufi, Shia, without it automatically meaning, ‘let’s have a theological argument.’ And that change has been happening slowly over time. Friendships have been happening between these different people, between Muslims in the West and in the Muslim world, between Shia, Sunni, Sufi, even between Salafis and progressives.
“I think one person put it that the Muslim community has an ‘irony deficiency.’ Because of that, we wanted to interject humor and wit into all the work we did, because we felt that it was a really good way to defuse tension and make the pill easier to swallow, so to speak. So one of the things we do, at the top of our Website, is we have little taglines that describe who we are, ‘cleared by Homeland Security,’ ‘no assets to freeze,’ ‘all the news that’s not fit to print.’
Ahhh. That’s just the type of humor that hopefully turns SM readers on (well most of them).
Going over to alt.mulsim.com we see that in addition to running the site, Amanullah and his wife are bloggers. His wife Hina, blogs about her recent experience with motherhood.
Go check out the main news site. There are lots of good and often controversial articles posted. Great brain food.
Having looked at a few articles on altmuslim.com I found lots of India-bashing and Jew-bashing screeds. The article on the British elections in which Oona King MP was pelted with eggs fails to mention that she was targeted because she is half Jewish and was commemorating the deaths of around 130 Jews who died in a German bombing attack in World War 2 on the East End of London. The eggs missed her and hit a 90 year old Jewish survivor of the attack. Great brain food indeed.
I saw more of the same. This was one of the comments
Dr. Khan, I agree with your sentiments about Indians being more prejudiced than Pakistanis. Where does this stem from? I have no idea. I even have some Indian Muslim friends who are more loyal to India than their fellow Muslim Brothers/Sisters in Pakistan, MIND BOGGLING!
I can’t understand what is so mind boggling about this! I guess there are very fundamental differences of opinion here.
Agreed. But… If the past week has taught us anything its that comment leavers are not always the most intelligent or civil bunch (present company excluded of course). With the good slips in the bad. The main stories and some of the links are quite informative, no?
Personally it sounds like a good idea. How it plays out in the end isn’t probably what the author’s/creator’s original intentions may be but it looks like a good start. No?
I thought the founder of Alt.Muslim was a Bangladeshi American and not an Indian American. A better website for checking out the trends within the American Muslim community would be the far more popular and controversial http://www.muslimwakeup.com which gets way more hits than alt.muslim.
Thanks for the link to the article about Indians being more prejudice than Pakistanis. Both the Muslims commenting agrees that being Muslim comes first than the nation a Muslim lives on. Which is what most right wingers in India says. So they aint totally wrong? And these pakis convienently forget that they were cheered and got a standing ovalation from the Chennai crowd when they won in 98 there. Last year when Indian team visited Pakistan it was made an event to prove to the world that Pakistan was safe to visit. There was no team agrring to visit pakistan. So How could they have done what they did with Indian team in 89 in Karachi. Those who dont know – The Indian captain(Srikanth) leading the side than was beaten by some spectrators on the ground itself. His shirt was torn apart. PS: I am writting this here because i dont think that site is gonna approve my resgistration.
Interesting comments. A few observations:
a) While my good Bengali friend Naeem Mohaiemen is indeed a co-editor of the site, I did start it, and invited him to contribute articles and help develop the editorial direction.
b) Please don’t judge the site by the one article by Muqtedar Khan. I’m of Indian heritage and proud of it. Despite whatever communal violence India has, I would choose it in a second over Pakistan (although I’m quite happy here in the US, land of my birth).
c) Maybe I should be more clear about the fact that comments don’t necessarily represent the viewpoint of altmuslim.com. I thought about deleting the more nasty ones, but I try to err on the side of free speech.
d) Sorry I haven’t updated my personal blog in so long.
Shahed,
No reasonable person is going to judge you by the comments other Muslims leave on your site. That is the risk your site (and this one for that matter) runs.
As for the contents of that particular article, I would say this – if Pakistan suffered from separatist violence to even half the degree India has, and everyone knew the Indian government was behind it, Pakistanis might not be so welcoming to Indian visitors.
KXB, Pakistan has considerably more sectarian violence than India. Only it is a lot more one sided. If you read Pakistani newspapers often, you would notice the consistent violence against minorities, Shia, Ahmediya, Christian and hindu. And for all the Pakistani double speak about muslim unity, they differentiate (on an official basis) between different kinds of muslims. Of course, there are also the small events of the Bangladeshi genocides against fellow muslims and the repeated anti Shia pogroms and the ongoing problems in Balochistan. I guess they don’t really count as separatist violence.
Personally, I find things based on conceptions like a “muslim world” somewhat repugnant, and sectarian in themselves. Religion is a very personal thing and has no place in these contexts. Consider what the response would be if people started talking about the “christian world” or the “hindu world” etc. Identification labels of this kind carry a certain smell of sectarianism with them. Religion has no place in the temporal world.
Not to mention the fact that tens of thousands have died in Punjab, Kashmir and various other places in India – due to terrorism sponsored and supported by Pakistan.
This ain’t a symmetrical relationship.
A,
I did not mean to suggest Pakistan’s domestic situation is all peaceful. But, if Pakistanis suspected that terrorists were being supplied from India, they would be suspicious of Indian intentions. You can see that suspicion from Sri Lanka – the LTTE drew a heavy amount of support from Tamil groups in India, much to the consternation of Sri Lanka.
I found lots of India-bashing and Jew-bashing screeds. The article on the British elections in which Oona King MP was pelted with eggs fails to mention that she was targeted because she is half Jewish and was commemorating the deaths of around 130 Jews who died in a German bombing attack in World War 2 on the East End of London. The eggs missed her and hit a 90 year old Jewish survivor of the attack. Great brain food indeed.
Unless you believe that the protestors threw eggs at the 90 year old because they had contempt for his Jewishness, I’ll file your non-sequitor along with Galloway’s response to King (saying she is responsible for the deaths of 100,000 Iraqi civilians), which implies that King wants to throw missiles (not eggs) at innocent Iraqis (not terrorists). Comparing the two and using your logic, you lose.
Zahed
What do I lose? Were we playing a game? What game was I playing? I dodnt realise, damn…
A non-sequitor is a fallacious argument which assumes that A follows B when in fact it does not follow. I made no assertion of any kind of cause and affect. You assumed I did. I was merely reporting on the facts of the matter. Any non-sequitor is therefore a construct of your own mind, irrelevant to my statement.
The thugs were shouting ‘You fucking Jews’ at the ninety year old Jewish survivors of the blitz. They were not aiming at Oona King, they were aiming at the ‘dirty Jews’ who had entered their midst.
In the meantime, here is an interesting article about the growth of anti-Semitism in Galloway land, I quote one line of comment specifically for you to file away with your ‘logic’ and prejudice (please note that I was not comparing this to anything, merely noting a manifestation of bigotry and hatred) :
In a letter to the Guardian, members of Respect said there was ‘no evidence that this egg-throwing was anti-semitic’. Although it didn’t condone them, ‘such episodes do occur’, and Galloway, John Major, Tony Blair and John Prescott had all had eggs thrown at them.
What can you say to that? Either it’s slyly trying to avoid alienating potential supporters or Respect is so morally shrivelled it can’t tell the difference between disrupting a political speech and attacking a service for the victims of fascism.
More on the pelting of elderly Jews who had gathered to commemorate their family members who died in German bombing in World War 2:
Within minutes, the mourners were pelted, first with vegetables, then with eggs. Some said they saw stones; others said they had been spat at. Gathered in old age to remember their dead, they felt under siege.
I was there and I must confess it did not look like an attack on Oona King to me. She was not especially visible, and no slogans were chanted or words uttered – as surely they would have been if this was merely a stance against King’s support of the Iraq war.
And there’s the testimony of Aminur Rahman, 18, who told me: “There’s a lot of hatred towards the Jewish. We’ve got hatred towards them.” He knew Sunday’s group were Jewish because of the skullcaps and he knew the story of the 1945 bomb. So was it wrong to attack people who were grieving? “It was wrong in a way, but I think they deserved it because they came into a Muslim community.”
+++++
I’m only raising this because some people are in denial about a rise in bigotry against Jews on the basis of collective responsibility and guilt, plain old fashioned hatred, physically assaulting individual Jews for the ‘crimes’ of others. It is the same logic as blaming all Muslims for 9/11 and I am shocked that anyone can decry one and yet excuse the other.
I’am not a Muslim and still do appreciate your venture – however small. In order to survive in a better way the present the great mankind needs greater intelligence more than wickedness. Religions which was originally intended to cleanse human mind in average way, have lost their urge in the confluence of global developments, and clergies who shout for “value” are the protectionists of their own order. Religion must now be revaluated or foreshkane.
I think most Muslims anywhere in the world have this one common problem. Their actions and thoughts on Islamic religion have always been misconstrued. Though they want to behave accordingly to what their religion profess at times the missperception nd misconception of other religion stop them from doing so. In the case of Hijab wearing for instance, many Muslim women everywhere have different views on the subject. I think our job is not to impose but to show the beauty of wearing the hijab.