 Tapping a Muslim community online
(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-03-17 07:49
Shabana Ahmadzai, 19, and Sara Bahmanpour, 20, like to hang out on a social network a fraction the size of Facebook. Their portraits enhanced by makeup or anime images, the women are logging on at Muxlim, a lifestyle community for Muslims. Started in 2006 by an Egyptian national, the site in English is one of a handful of specifically Muslim communities developing a niche in a growing market. Others include Mecca.com and Islamicaweb.com. Ahmadzai, who lives in Finland but is from Afghanistan, has been part of Muxlim for two years. She found it easier than on Facebook to make friends and join groups, and likes the site's culturally sympathetic sounding-board. "We all share the same ideology, even if you're non-Muslim or even atheist... the fact that you are interested in knowing about Islam or knowing how Muslims are, it kind of brings the entire site into one," she said at a cafe in a Helsinki mall. Muxlim is tiny: in Britain alone, it registered just 22,000 unique visitors in January versus 22 million for Facebook according to Internet database ComScore. ComScore does not register traffic for Mecca.com and Islamicaweb.com. Mecca.com says it has 50,000 users, while a member search on Islamicaweb.com returns 9,748 users. The sites all feature videos, news, images, blogs and chat related to Muslim culture and Islam. Ahmadzai's real-life friend Bahmanpour, a Finnish-Iranian who joined Muxlim recently, said she has 52 friends on the site mostly from the United States and Britain, and likes it because it involves Muslims from the conservative to the very liberal. She has on her profile three images of herself in a veil taken by a professional photographer: in one she wears make-up to imitate a superhero. "This actually caused quite a discussion. Quite a few people told me I emphasize myself too much in the pictures," Bahmanpour said. "Basically it just shows how different we all are." As registered users of Muxlim, the girls are connected to about 150,000 users worldwide who chat, share content, participate in polls and read news items from Muslim countries. They can also create their own virtual characters - avatars - and interact with others. "Socially conservative Muslims with more rigorous rules for interacting with the opposite gender often have no problems communicating with one another online," said American-Pakistani journalist and blogger Ali Eteraz. Eteraz said he has seen such sites pick up a large number of members at launch, but then growth slows down significantly: much depends on marketing budgets. Muxlim's 24-year-old creator, Mohamed El-Fatatry, says the total number of site visitors has accelerated to 1.5 million monthly from 100,000 18 months ago. "The figure is only a humble two percent of the world's online Muslim population," said El-Fatatry, who came from the United Arab Emirates to Finland to study in 2004, lured by the Nordic country's reputation as a hotbed of tech innovation. Muxlim does not have a strict editorial policy, but does monitor traffic to avoid vulgar language or racist or sexually explicit images, El-Fatatry said. Ahmadzai and Bahmanpour said they use Muxlim because of the friends they have made and discussions they have. Ahmadzai, who has a Japanese anime image on her profile, says in some discussions people say she is "too open" about things. She cites a conversation about a newlywed wife's right to not sleep with her husband until she is ready: "I believe discussions like these are exactly the reason why you should stay online. If we don't discuss, we won't learn." Reuters (China Daily 03/17/2009 page11) |
