A Congregation of Muslim Bloggers

Have you ever wanted to gauge Muslim opinion on various issues? Perhaps you’re interested in their thoughts on the recent Swiss minaret ban, or the Danish Cartoon crisis?

Whether you’re researching an article, want to find like-minded people, or are simply curious, the Muslim Bloggers Directory can help!

Open the directory, and you should see a box in the left-hand sidebar, titled: “SEARCH BLOGS”. Enter your search term into the form, click “GO”, et voila! You’ll be presented with relevant search results that have been derived from the database of 600+ (and growing!) Muslim blogs listed on the directory.

The aim of the custom search engine is to promote real Muslim opinion, and encourage discussion, debate and dialogue. Everyone is welcome to use it; especially those who wish to improve the representation of the Muslim community within mainstream media.

As the site grows, so too will the range and diversity of the Muslim voices promoted by our search feature. Therefore we ask that you please continue to submit your favourite Muslim blogs to the directory.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

Originally posted at MuslimMatters.org

With the Brass Crescent Awards coming to a close, and the launch of the new Muslims Bloggers Directory, I feel it’s a good time to take a closer look at the world of Muslim blogging.

I’ve had the honour of working on several online initiatives alongside MuslimMatters these past couple of years. In particular, the website Ijtema.net, which, since its launch back in 2007, has aimed to promote the ‘best of the Muslim blogosphere’.

Our initial approach to achieve this goal was to act as a type of human filter of the Islaminet: our team of editors would link to Muslim-authored content that we found interesting, in the hope that our readers would too. I guess that they did, as we were nominated for a BCA last year under the category “Best Group Blog” – though we were beaten by some unknown entity called “MuslimMatters.org”. Anyone ever heard of them?

However, as the number of Muslim blogs we followed became greater and greater, and the spare time of our editors became less and less, we knew we could not sustain our efforts for much longer. We decided to close the site, albeit temporarily, and focus on a new, hopefully more efficient strategy.

That eventually led to the launch of the Muslim Bloggers Directory – a freely accessible, categorised collection of links to Muslim blogs, vlogs, and other multimedia channels, with a custom search engine allowing visitors to search through the actual content of listed sites.

[Read more →]

Bismillah

Assalamu ‘alaykum dear friends of Ijtema.net!

It’s finally here… an exciting, new development from the Ijtema team… the Muslim Bloggers Directory!

The Muslim Bloggers Directory is a categorised collection of links to Muslim blogs, vlogs, and other multimedia channels, with a custom search engine allowing visitors to search through the actual contents of listed sites. It is open to submissions from the public… and it is entirely FREE!

Come on over and see if your site has been listed. If not, submit it today, and become part of the Ijtema community! Visit the FAQ page to learn more about the directory and how to use it, including how to claim an existing entry.

We hope to see you there soon!

As-Salamu Alaikum dear readers

As you have noticed, IJTEMA has been silent for the past half year or so. However, as promised, we had been working behind the scene on our next service. It derives from the same IJTEMA philosophy- sharing good content.

In preparation for the forthcoming launch of our latest service, we launched a new Facebook page, and Twitter stream.

To find out more, please stay tuned on Facebook and Twitter. If enough of you join the fan page on Facebook, we can register for a decent shortcut (i.e., facebook.com/ijtema). So please become a fan NOW!

We shall make the final announcements very soon, inshaAllah.

Please remember IJTEMA and the whole Ummah in your Du’a in this blessed month.

Salaam dear readers,

IJTEMA is in crisis. We tried to come up with solutions, but we have failed so far. The model that we work on- reading a ton of blogs, selecting a few of them, posting them and finding relevant image is a very time consuming process. We are not even sure how much we have achieved, looking at our site meter. It would seem that the model of IJTEMA is a failure.

We also had constant attrition in memebers leaving the group because of their other, “real life” obligations- as IJTEMA duty takes quite some time. And it is not even clear what was being achieved. We had trouble getting new recruits, as we did not write much ourselves, but promoted others’ writings.

The IJTEMA photo contest that we had, two years ago was a success, and I look back at that wistfully. We were unable to do something similar this year.

So we have decided to shut down the normal operation of IJTEMA for the time being. We do not want the brand that we have made to get lost, so the site will be there for some time, inshaAllah. Also because we want the archives to be available, at least for some time.

We are also planning to have a blog directory. InshaAllah it will be completed.

In the meantime, if you want something of your own writing to be published here at IJTEMA, please do forward it to editor AT ijtema DOT net

Therefore, allow me to say JazakAllah khair to our group members, the writers and to our readers for staying around all these years when we were experimenting with IJTEMA, and inspiring us. We hope to be back, one day, when we have another idea worth experimenting with. InshaAllah that time it will be a success.

As indicated in the previous post, as the Islamosphere has grown in size, our job has become harder and harder. We are going on a hiatus for brainstorming. We shall be back in a month, inshaAllah!

This book got a warm recommendation by one of the biggest Danish news papers.

Shelina Zahra Janmohamed blogs at spirit21, and she is the winner of brass crescent awards for best blog and best female blog.She writes:

I took the book to a number of publishers whose commissioning editors loved the story, but couldn’t see it fitting with the existing mould of books about Muslim women. “We need an ‘alias’ of a book that is already out there so people understand how it relates to previous books,” they explained, meaning it should be either a forced marriage story or one of escape from Islam.

With such black and white views about the stories that Muslim women are permitted to tell, how can it ever be possible to create an understanding of our diversity and complexity?

I hope my book brings a fresh perspective to the discussion about Muslim women. But there is a serious question to be asked – will it provoke the Muslim community to look into itself and wonder why these lazy stereotypes exist? Sometimes as Muslims we lack an intellectual honesty about ourselves, and are not brave enough to tell our stories as human beings on a journey, with all our flaws. If publishers are guilty of monolithic misery memoirs, then Muslims must also take some of the blame for not sharing our universal experiences in a language and context that everyone can relate to.

To find out more, click here.

Anybody in the USA and near Atlanta, will be delighted to hear that there is an art gala happing close to them.

The main goal of the Art Gala is to promote understanding and tolerance through the medium of art. They believe that the universal language of art is one of the few forms of expression that can transcend divisions like race, religion, and other boundaries we set up for ourselves. It is also important because this event promotes a celebration of diversity and a coming together of different races and faiths.

Some of the artists that are participating are Haji Noor Deen from China, Peter Gould from Australia and Kelly Izdihar Crosby from Dubai, as well as local Atlanta artists.

For more information about the event, go to the Emory Art Gala website.