A LONG STRUGGLE AHEAD: Sultan Shahin set up a website that has taken on the religious right head-on.
For Shahin, the experience was transformative. "It became clear to me that the Islam that I believe in was under serious threat," he says, "and that I would have to do something if the religion I loved was not to be demeaned by the evil that was being spoken in its name."
Last year, Shahin set up a website that has taken on the religious right head-on. Though run on a shoestring budget and without the help of full-time staff, New Age Islam ( http://www.newageislam.com/) is visited by hundreds of readers every day. Its electronic newsletter has over 29,000 subscribers.
New Age Islam provides its audience to a wide range of original theological and political writing that does not figure in the mainstream media. In recent weeks, New Age Islam has seen debates on Niyaz Fatehpuri, a twentieth-century literary figure with unconventional ideas on the concept of divine revelation, as well as the neo-conservative televangelist Zakir Naik.
In a recent essay, Shahin argued that the Islam of the neo-fundamentalists was in fact a "a completely new religion" theologically founded "on a wilful misinterpretation of the Islamic concept of jihad."
Electronic journals like New Age Islam reach out to a small, but influential, section of India's Muslims: an emerging class of Muslim professionals and entrepreneurs who are finding that the traditionalist practices of the parents offer few solutions to the struggles of life. Islamists have been adroit at capitalising on their anxieties. Many of India's jihadists — among them, the leadership of the Indian Mujahideen — came from urban middle class backgrounds and had received a privileged elite education.
Read More at: http://www.hindu.com/2009/03/24/stories/2009032450460900.htm
http://syedmdasadullah.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-age-islam-battles-fundamentalists_24.html
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