Islam takes to the Web after

Reuters, Sep. 11, 2002
http://www.reuters.co.uk/
By Edmund Blair

CAIRO (Reuters) - When Thomas from the United States wanted to know what the Muslim world had to say one year after the September 11 attacks, he turned to IslamOnline.net.

His request was courteous, unlike some angry questions sent in the past year to the website which offers online Islamic fatwas — or religious edicts — as well as news and advice to Muslims and others interested in the Islamic world.

But regardless of the questioner’s sympathies, IslamOnline aims to offer authoritative statements from scholars on Islam, reflecting differing views from various schools of thought.

“Today we have broken relations, broken hearts, broken trusts and broken homes, broken buildings and towns…The last September 11th has made us all more sensitive to this brokenness in all of us,” Muzammil Siddiqi, a U.S.-based scholar, wrote to Thomas, who described himself only as a non-Muslim from America.

IslamOnline was set up two years before Muslim hijackers slammed planes into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, but the attacks raised its profile as hits on the site almost tripled to about 2.8 million a day.

In the aftermath of September 11, more and more people have turned to the Web for news and views from the Islamic world.

The Internet has not only been a tool for the kind of moderate and broad-minded approach of IslamOnline, which has its editorial offices in a quiet residential area of bustling Cairo and headquarters in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar.

Radical voices, some with apparent links to suspected September 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, have also turned to the Net to vent their opinions. Some analysts say they may be using the Internet to contact allies and win new followers as the war on terror continues.

As militants lost their territorial base in Afghanistan and were squeezed out of mosques by wary Arab governments, many seem to have turned to the virtual world to pursue what some describe as an “electronic jihad“, or holy war.

The extent of the influence of such sites is difficult to gauge, analysts say. But some point to a precedent that might worry regional governments. Ayatollah Khomeini used the modern technology of his day, audio cassettes, to send fiery sermons from abroad and help foment Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

VIRTUAL CHALLENGE
“There is what we might call today a virtual al Qaeda,” said Reuven Paz, an Israeli who specialises in Islamist movements and keeps a close eye on radical Islamic and other websites.

After last year’s devastating U.S. military campaign against Afghanistan, bin Laden and his associates seem to have been pushed off the television screens. But their alleged messages still appear sporadically on the Net through websites such as www.alneda.com or www.jehad.net, although many such sites have been blocked.

IslamOnline itself issued a report in August saying it had obtained a letter written by bin Laden, but says the story was a straightforward journalist’s “scoop” and not because of any links to al Qaeda.

“It is easy for youngsters now to feel that they take part in the ‘jihad’ sitting at home, without the need to go to volunteer and to go to Afghanistan, or Bosnia, or Palestine or other places,” said Paz.

Such surfers may not be about to take up the armed struggle right away, but Paz said some might imbibe ideas that could express themselves in the long term.

Others are more sceptical about the influence of such sites. Radical groups may not be winning more recruits through their violent language or actions because so far their campaign has only unleashed more woes for Muslims, some say.

But the catchment area is growing fast as countries across the Middle East and Muslim world, many with youthful populations, open up to the World Wide Web.

Analysts said the Internet, which has proved so hard for governments to censor, is an ideal channel for those with a radical Muslim agenda — many in exile — to spread their views when they have no voice on television, radio or newspapers back home.

Diaa Rashwan, an Egyptian academic working on a book about Islam on the Web, says Islamists in Egypt no longer control mosques that used to be a key place to spread their ideas.

“For them now, it is not a problem at all to fight through the Internet,” he said.

He said Islamic radicals had been swifter than other political activists in the region to take advantage of modern technology, perhaps because so many appeared to have been drawn from the ranks of scientists and engineers with technical minds.

One example is Ayman al-Zawahri, bin Laden’s right-hand man, who was a surgeon before founding Egypt’s Jihad group and then joining Saudi-born bin Laden in Afghanistan.

Zawahri was even issued an invitation via the Internet to attend a Cairo seminar by telephone or e-mail in September. But he failed to make a cyber-appearance.

Paradoxically, the anti-Western programme of extremists like Zawahri has not prevented them from turning to an electronic network with origins largely associated with universities and defence projects in their number one enemy, the United States.

“For them, I don’t think they recognise that this technology is a Western one…They distinguish between the material development of the West and the moral and ethical development of the West,” said Rashwan, who is an analyst at Cairo’s Al Ahram Centre for Strategic and Political Studies.

BEYOND THE CENSOR
As well as avoiding the censors, cyberspace may have played an important role to galvanise scattered elements who support a network like al Qaeda, however informal its structure.

Whether or not the Web has been used to issue orders from Qaeda leaders is unclear, but analysts said alleged messages from the group — like the one issued on alneda.com in June purportedly from al Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman abu Ghaith — could offer encouragement to disparate cells.

Also open for debate is how to counter the influence of such views on the Web.

Some analysts say simply blocking the websites would not address the root causes that drive people to support such groups, including frustrations with society at home.

But sites like IslamOnline may already be playing a role, if unintentionally, by providing a site that allows Muslims and non-Muslims, religiously conservative or avowedly secular surfers, to debate the issues.

“You cannot fight radicalism and you should not worry about how much people listen to that radical message. All you can do is widen the scope of the mainstream so that radicalism would not become the mainstream,” said Heba Raouf, an Egyptian political scientist and a member of the group which founded IslamOnline.

“What we are trying to do is make a platform and bring people together, and ask people to think more,” she said.

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