Bismillah-hiRahma-niRaheem
In the Name of God, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful

March 2007 saw the launch of Ijtema.net - a service aiming to promote the true voice of the Muslim community, in an effort to combat the Islamophobic diatribe that regularly floods the results pages of your typical Islam-related Google search. To this end, the editorial team turned to a relatively untapped source of Muslim opinion and debate: the blogosphere, bringing our readers a daily selection of well-written and insightful entries.

One year on, however, it has become obvious that relying on the written word alone is not the best way to engage the short attention spans of the up-and-coming “YouTube generation”. Thus, to celebrate our first anniversary, we decided to treat the site to a makeover, aiming to relaunch with a variety of new, and eye-catching multimedia content, including photography, videos and podcasts.

Our first challenge was to familiarize ourselves with a completely different breed of Muslim blogger - those who express themselves in imagery, rather than print - hence, the inspiration behind the Ijtema.net photo contest (click here for the results!).

Next, we worked to bring you the best of the Islamic videosphere and Art world, by collaborating with ‘experts’ in these fields: namely the hard-working guys down at HalalTube.com, and the Muslim artist Teakster, who has been a great help in judging and organising the photo contest. Our own team member, sister iMuslim, will be making full use of her latest iPod by taking care of the Audio and podcast side of things, insha’Allah. Finally, the rest of the crew will continue in their original roles of sifting through the Muslim blogosphere, in search of interesting articles that they feel are worth sharing.

With all that in place, what now remains is the long-term challenge of bringing you, the readers, inspiring content that covers the spectrum of multimedia creativity; and with Allah’s help, everything is easy.

So please feel free to navigate the new features of the site, give us your feedback, and help us to spread the beauty of Islam by telling others about this initiative, and by sending in your tips.

Huge thanks to Shazia Mistry who did an excellent job redesigning the new site, masha’Allah, based on the Visionary template. Also to Teakster for producing our very first official logo!

May Allah accept our endeavours, and grant His Peace, Mercy and Blessings to us all. Ameen.

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Announcement, Blogosphere, Internet & Multimedia