Category Archives: CyberOrient

Faulkner in Iraq

CyberOrient, Iraq, Literature


Videoconferencing Faulkner in Iraq

By Jennifer Howard, The Chronicle Online, June 24

Thanks to videoconferencing, literary criticism is playing a small part in the rebuilding of Iraq.

At the end of last year, Steve Wilson, a professor of English at Texas State University at San Marcos, got an email from a U.S. official working on provincial reconstruction in Iraq. Through contacts at Iraqi universities, the official had met some professors of English who wanted to find a way to talk to their U.S. counterparts about literature. So he went looking on the Internet for American professors who had experience that might be relevant and found Mr. Wilson, who had taught in a largely Muslim country, Malaysia. Continue reading Faulkner in Iraq →

Facebook vs. the Holy Book

CyberOrient, Development, Pakistan

The news out of Pakistan teeters between bad and worse. First, there are the drones targeting Taliban leaders and often taking out civilians as long-range missile attacks tend to do. Then there is the lingering concern about the government’s stability, especially given the fact that Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Throw in the claim that as many as a quarter of the population is below the poverty line and it is hard to see a silver lining in all the doom and gloom statistics. But this is the Internet Era, so virtual reality is not out of touch with reality in contemporary Pakistan. Now it seems that virtual reality has become more important than the price of bread, perhaps in part because of the price of bread. In recent days the government of Pakistan has started blocking both Facebook and Google.

The problem with Facebook is with a group that launched an “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day,” a group that most professional political cartoonists see as “shock for shock’s sake.” Continue reading Facebook vs. the Holy Book →

Surfing in Sanaa

CyberOrient, Development, Sanaa, Yemen

Internet cafes offer more to Yemen’s youth
by Teresa Gedi, Yemen Observer, April 3, 2010

Al-Mortazah internet cafe, located at the foot of the Friendship Bridge near Tahrir square, takes the meaning of internet café to another level. In addition to its 20 computer stations, it has a full service sheesha bar and cafe from which I enjoyed a glass of fresh mango juice courtesy of the soft-spoken poet and journalist Abdul Rahman Ghelan.

Mr. Ghelan, age 30, has frequented the café since his personal computer broke down some months ago. As the place is close to his home and affordable (1 riyal per minute), he takes his time exploring various literary and journalistic websites across the Arab world. Being a poet, Ghelan finds the web to be an effective means of spreading his work and developing it through feedback from the online literary community. Feeling I had stumbled on a budding international artist, I listened intently as he humbly explained his work which focuses largely on politics, women and children. “My poetry has benefited greatly from web exposure in both the Arab world and outside. Literary personalities in Europe for example have contacted me requesting to translate my work into other languages, specifically, French and Italian.” Ghelan is also currently working on a translation of a book into English entitled “Memoirs of the Victim,” the victim being women in Yemen. Another poem “hams al-abir” or “The Whisper of Perfume” has caused quite a stir in the online Arabic poetry community. “I am amazed by the support I receive online,” says Ghelan. “As long as you are appropriate and respectful, it feels like people are right next to you supporting you.” Continue reading Surfing in Sanaa →

Timbukto and Manuscripts too

Archaeology and Antiquities, CyberOrient, Islamic Texts, Mali

The following information comes from a website devoted to the preservation and digitalization of the many Arabic manuscripts archived in Mali. The main website is http://www.timbuktufoundation.org.

The Timbuktu manuscripts are a symbolic representation of the impact of the early schools and universities (XII-XVIth century) that existed in West Africa (Timbuktu-Gao-Djenné-Kano). However, the manuscripts that remain in Timbuktu are only part of the intellectual heritage of the region because other manuscripts can be found throughout West Africa.

Today, this entire African intellectual legacy is on the verge of being lost. The brittle condition of the manuscripts i.e. pages disintegrate easily like ashes. The termites, insects, weather, piracy of the manuscripts, and the selling of these treasures to tourists for food money pose a serious threat to the future of the manuscripts of Timbuktu. Continue reading Timbukto and Manuscripts too →

Unblocking the Blockers

CyberOrient, Yemen

Introducing, “The Circumventer”

By ALEXANDRA SANDELS, Menassat, May 20, 2009

At a Kamal Adham Journalism Institute “Blogging for the Future” conference in Cairo, the Al-Kasir made its first public appearance.

A tool that allows Internet users to access blocked websites, developer Walid Al-Saqaf, a Sweden-based Yemeni, is using the device to respond to government web censorship.

“I realized that the authorities are getting so sophisticated that they need a similarly sophisticated response that could match up to their level that would limit their control over what users can access from within their countries,” he said.

The tool also performs periodic checks on censored sites to track whether they remain constantly blocked or if the filtering is lifted at times. Meanwhile, users of the program can report information about filtering and blocking in their respective countries. The data gets stored in a centralized unit in the software.

Al-Saqaf, who also launched Yemen’s first independent news search engine a few years ago, has been a target of Yemeni government censorship. In the spring of 2008, the five different domains of Yemenportal were shut down, making the site inaccessible in Yemen, except through the use of proxy sites. Continue reading Unblocking the Blockers →

Historicizing Arab blogs

CyberOrient

Historicizing Arab blogs: Reflections on the transmission of ideas and information in Middle Eastern history

by Brian Ulrich, Arab Media & Society, Spring 2009.

[This is an excerpt; to read the whole article, click here.]

Arab blogs have caught the attention of Middle East watchers. Much of the attention dedicated to them, however, has dealt with their political importance, whether as a mobilizing tool for activists or as an alternative source of news reporting. Blogging is also interesting, however, as a new and perhaps significant departure in the history of media in the Middle East. By this I do not mean “media” in the common late 20th century usage in which it applies primarily to those who work within unidirectional mass media, but rather as a medium of communication. In particular, I am interested in the way media enables and structures relationships between and among senders and receivers of ideas and information, as well as in the mechanisms of reception of messages and the perceptions of media forms and transmitters which circumscribe their authority. Continue reading Historicizing Arab blogs →

Hajj on Second Life

Anthropology/Sociology, CyberOrient, Islamic Rituals


Aerial View of the Masjid Al-Haram, Second Life

Hajj on Second Life

by Krystina Derrickson, excerpt from Second Life and The Sacred: Islamic Space in a Virtual World, Digital Islam, 2008. For the full article, click here.

Mecca is the holiest site in the Muslim world, the literal nexus of the Islamic universe, the direction towards which Muslims worldwide pray and are buried facing, and the figurative, spiritual, and philosophical nexus, flattening history, faith, practice, and praxis[41]. It is the home of the Ka’baa, a large cubical structure believed to have been built by Ibrahim and Isma’il. The Hajj is the pilgrimage, one of the five pillars of the Islamic faith, required at least once by all able-bodied Muslims undertaken during the month long Hajj period.

The Hajj sim is sponsored by IslamOnline.net (IOL), a popular and comprehensive Islamic website run by Egyptian Islamic scholar Yusuf Al-Qaradawi which offers a multitude of services, from e-fatwas, halal business directories, news, and multimedia to matrimonial services and a “cyber-counselor”.[42] Continue reading Hajj on Second Life →

New Age Islam in the Digital Age

CyberOrient, Islam in Europe, Journalism and Media, Pakistan

A LONG STRUGGLE AHEAD: Sultan Shahin set up a website that has taken on the religious right head-on.

Praveen Swami, The Hindu, March 24, 2009

Back in the summer of 1999, Sultan Shahin found himself being hectored by an earnest young man outside London’s Finsbury Park mosque.

“You Indian Muslims are cowards,” Shahin was told “but soon you will have just two choices: either to become a true Muslim like us, or to perish.”

For Shahin, the experience was transformative. “It became clear to me that the Islam that I believe in was under serious threat,” he says, “and that I would have to do something if the religion I loved was not to be demeaned by the evil that was being spoken in its name.”

Last year, Shahin set up a website that has taken on the religious right head-on. Though run on a shoestring budget and without the help of full-time staff, New Age Islam (http://www.newageislam.com/) is visited by hundreds of readers every day. Its electronic newsletter has over 29,000 subscribers.

New Age Islam provides its audience to a wide range of original theological and political writing that does not figure in the mainstream media. In recent weeks, New Age Islam has seen debates on Niyaz Fatehpuri, a twentieth-century literary figure with unconventional ideas on the concept of divine revelation, as well as the neo-conservative televangelist Zakir Naik. Continue reading New Age Islam in the Digital Age →