CARA ANNA scrolls through a couple video sharing sites dedicate to the Muslim community.
"60 ways to keep your wife's love guaranteed!"
"LETS NOT ASK CNN ... HOW MUSLIM WOMEN FEELS?"
"Video blog #9 Who hijacked my religion?"
"Will Jesus Christ (peace be upon him) come again?"
"A 5 year old from a non muslim family knows full quran (miracle)"
At least two YouTube-ish video-sharing sights designed for the Muslim community are appearing this year. IslamicTube.net was the first to arrive, from Dubai, led by a 23-year-old student named Murad Miah and a collection of volunteers around the world. (Most users, though, seem to be from the U.S. and Britain.)
A more glossy site, Muxlim.tv, is set to launch in July out of Finland, though a placeholder site, IslamicVideos.net, is already up and running. Both sites want to create a space more friendly to Muslims, with more restrictions on content and more protection, they hope, from what Muxlim Inc. chairman Mohamed El-Fatatry calls "the racist, offensive and attacking remarks they normally get when they upload their videos on YouTube or other video sharing sites."
Not that those comments will completely go away. Someone posting as "stopislam" under "Video blog #4 Muslim while flying" on IslamicTube wrote, "This is the biggest load of crap that I have ever heard." (Followed shortly by the response: "I say, 'well, what do you know?! ... another ignorant AND uneducated fool!!"
Explore the sites, and you'll find a Muslim game show, personal stories about conversion to Islam, lectures on the life of Mohammed, music videos, Quran recitations and even an interview with former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg. The videos come from all kinds of sources, professional to homemade. Many are in English or have subtitles, though one hot video last week on IslamicVideos.net, on a Christian-born boy who apparently knew the full Quran by the time he was 1 1/2 years old, had, frustratingly, no translation at all.
The sites say they are self-policing. IslamicTube.net usually doesn't permit instrumental music, for example, and it took down a video of Iraqi fighters singing because the video with the music showed explosions. The site's main page last week also featured a video called "Israelis Exposed" that required viewers to sign in first, saying the video contained "inappropriate material."
Each site has a grand vision of sorts. IslamicTube's is charity.
"The feature we intend to have is a Donate button on the specific (humanitarian) videos so after the user watches the video they can make a donation if they wish," Miah says.
And Muxlim.tv wants to compensate the best video makers to "encourage citizen journalism and mass production," El-Fatatry says.
Laurie King-Irani watches the intersection of Islam and technology from her post as a visiting assistant anthropology professor at The Catholic University of America. She likes Muslim rap and hip-hop videos, especially, for the way they break down stereotypes, and she's noticed that those with the most active agenda, religious or political, tend to have the best-produced videos. She likes the idea of the sites overall.
"Videos can humanize people we tend to demonize," she says.
She's seen what she calls racist and cruel comments made about Islamic videos on mainstream sites like YouTube, so she isn't surprised that Muslims have created a space of their own.
However. "I think balkanizing the Web is a bad idea, as the power of the Web is its ability to bring different views and voices and worlds in touch with each other," she says.
See for yourself. Start exploring with the links we have here:
-- Muslim While Flying
-- Muxlim Commercial (Mac vs. PC Style)
-- Mecca/Qibla Cola
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Cara Anna works on the AP's North America Desk.
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