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My hosting for this website expires in two weeks time and while renewing it will not break the bank, I do wonder whether I ought to let it lapse. An argument once put to me for continuing to publish my thoughts was that the Internet is the one platform of mass communication that Muslims have [...]

Who sits this side of the computer terminal, tapping out words that shoot out across the web? Nobody knows. Nobody knows if the author is a believer or a doubter, the pious or a sinner, the learned or the ignorant, a guide, the guided, the misguided or a misguider. Nobody knows if the author is [...]

We have come along way from my daily consumption of iViews and BBC News Online ten years ago. Yes, because today my regular online reading list includes three particular websites consistently: Engadget, Smashing Magazine and PCPro. Gone are the days seeking the latest from the Middle East, South Asia, The War on Terror™ and Islamophobia [...]

It is a sentiment that several of us have noticed being repeated with increasing frequency on the world-wide-web: that the Muslim blogosphere is dying a death, that all the good blogs have disappeared, that the Muslim blogging phenomenon has run its course and all that remains is tired, uninspirational, repetitive dross. As a so-called blogger [...]

Most search engine terms that people use to find my website are quite mundane and boring. This one today really made me laugh, however: ‘muslims are smelly neighbours london‘. They would have got my post on remembering your neighbours’ rights, but all sorts of pictures are now flowing through my mind… An estate agent who [...]

I’m not really sure about this Web 2.0 malarkey. I’ve just deleted my Facebook account again. Last time it was because I imagined a fantastical conspiracy in which key investors were databasing our identities for unspeakable ends. I can’t remember how the account came to be resurrected, but somehow I delved back in and rebuilt [...]

In just a moment I am going to disconnect my personal computer from the internet; I am going to unplug the network cable from the back. In the Qur’an we read that there is good and bad in alcohol, but the harm outweighs the benefit. Just now, at this moment in time, the internet is [...]

A realisation dawns that is not really a new realisation at all. It is something I already knew. Something I knew three months ago, a year ago and seven years ago. Much of the content on the internet is poison. The internet is just a tool and we make of it what we will, but [...]

Four and a half years ago we disposed of our television because we found it eating up our evenings after work. Indeed, in the wake of the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York, we felt we had to sit glued to every news broadcast… the end of the Six O’Clock News, all of [...]

I came across this some weeks back, but thought it was not working because there was no sound – turned out to be a computer problem. Fulaan ibn Fulaan helped me rediscover it after my very long and boring post entitled Hatim – may Allah reward him. And now Ann and my friend Tariq from [...]

Weblogs have come under quite some fire recently in the newspaper I regularly buy. Janet Street-Porter‘s comment last week was followed a day later by an article by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. In both cases their generalisations are quite amazing. For me and many others this medium is a mere tool. Around 1993 my introduction to the [...]