IslamOnline website in crisis as employees in Egypt stage sit-in

[Al-khiyal]

IslamOnline website in crisis as employees in Egypt stage sit-in

March 16, 2010 -- The future of one of the largest Islamic websites in the world was in doubt today after hundreds of staff walked out, accusing new managers of trying to hijack the site in order to promote a hardline, conservative agenda. IslamOnline, which draws over 120,000 visitors a day and is one of the most popular internet destinations in the Middle East, was plunged into crisis following an attempt by the website's senior management in Qatar to wrest control of the site's content away from its editorial offices in Cairo.

Insiders claim that the move, which would involve many of the site's 350 Egypt-based staff losing their jobs, is part of a broader effort by conservative elements in the Gulf to reshape the identity of a media outlet long viewed as a bastion of liberal and reformist voices within the Islamic world. "This is not an issue of money," journalist Fathi Abu Hatab told the Guardian via telephone from the website's offices, which are currently under occupation by staff. "It's a matter of editorial independence and media ethics, and we are not going to back down. They are trying to hijack IslamOnline, and we are resisting."

IslamOnline was founded in 1997 by the controversial Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a popular preacher who has previously been banned from entering the United States and Britain. Promoting a "holistic" vision of Islam, it offered Muslims a wide range of online guidance on political, family and social issues. With a reputation for including non-Muslims and secular Muslims on its payroll, the multilingual website quickly gained global popularity as a source for theological answers to questions involving everything from homosexuality to Hamas.

"When it was launched, IslamOnline was very distinctive and very different," said one former employee, who worked for the site for seven years. "Most other Islamic websites are quite dull and dense, but this one saw Islam as a way of life and offered practical help."

Most importantly, it enjoyed a degree of editorial independence from its financial backers, a welcome rarity in the Arab media world. That independence came under threat last month when a new set of Qatar-based managers criticised journalists in Egypt, where most of the site's content is produced, for running articles on Valentine's Day and film festivals, and began to shut down sections of the website devoted to culture and youth. That put the site's board of directors on a direct collision course with staff, who soon found that their access to the website's servers had been restricted.

Today, after hearing reports that many of them were to be fired as part of an editorial shake-up, over 250 staff went on strike. "We will all resign," said Abu Hatab. "They may own the offices and the URL, but they don't own us." Workers taking part in the sit-in used a variety of innovative ways to air their grievances to the general public, including setting up real-time video footage from inside the offices and streaming it on the web. "Those of us that stayed in the building overnight slept on our desks," said the site's new media analyst, Abdallah Elshamy. "But when we weren't sleeping we were also putting out a lot of messages on Twitter and other social media which kept the attention on us and eventually forced management to the negotiating table."

Analysts believe that the dispute at IslamOnline is part of a wider conflict between Salafist Muslims in the Gulf, who follow a more literal and traditional interpretation of the Qur'an, and the more reformist brand of Islam popular in countries like Egypt.

[Al-khiyal]

[Al-khiyal]

Workers' jihad at Islamic website

March 16, 2010 -- Islamic advice websites aren't the first thing that spring to mind when talking of strikes, sit-ins and workers' occupations, but if there's any proof needed that Egypt's extraordinary wave of industrial action is every corner of the nation, then today's drama at IslamOnline.net fits the bill. With more than 120,000 hits a day and a global reach that extends through several languages, IslamOnline is one of the biggest and most influential Muslim websites. From Baghdad to Basildon, Muslims use it as a key source of scholarly advice on everything from impotency to the insurgency in Iraq.

So the question of who owns and controls the site is a vitally important one. And that's the question being wrestled over today, after hundreds of staff walked out in protest over what they say is an attempt by conservatives in the Gulf to hijack the site and force it to pursue a more traditional and hardline agenda. Tension had been simmering for months between the website's Cairo-based editorial offices and the managers in Doha, whose plan this week to fire many of the 350 employees in Egypt led to an all-night occupation of the company's offices, which was still continuing at the time of writing.

"We're all resigning," Fathi Abu Hatab, a former IslamOnline journalist and one of the strike leaders, told me over the phone from inside the building. "If we lose this battle then IslamOnline as we know it will be dead. We were an exception – in our professionalism, in our moderation, in our refusal to be bound by hidden agendas. And like all exceptions in the Arab World, we've come to the end of the line."

So what is the battle, exactly? There's not a lot of agreement on this point, with a host of competing explanations trickling out of the IslamOnline offices on to Twitter, Facebook and even a live online video stream that the workers set-up to show their grievances to the world. Some of the staff believe this is primarily a business dispute over pay, conditions and company management but others are reading more into it, placing the tussle over editorial control at IslamOnline into a wider political rivalry between Egypt and Qatar, and an even broader context of cultural warfare between Egypt and the Gulf.

As detailed in the news reports, there's certainly a lot of evidence to suggest that a new board of directors in Doha has been throwing its weight around in debates over the site's content. Analysts have argued that the site's relatively open and inclusive nature (where discussions over homosexuality sit side by side with the latest fatwas on vegetarianism, martyrdom and T-shirts) has unnerved some of IslamOnline's more conservative financial backers in the Gulf. At this stage it's hard to verify that one way or another, but if true it would only be the latest salvo in a long-running campaign by the Gulf to wrest cultural ascendancy in the Arab World away from Egypt.

In the often febrile Middle Eastern media market, domination of the cultural landscape has tended to go hand in hand with political ascendancy. Historically the biggest centres of cultural production were Beirut and Cairo; the latter's singers, film-makers, actors and writers were untouchable in the 1950s and 1960s. Egypt's status as the capital of Arab culture mirrored its political fortunes under Gamal Abdel Nasser; Umm Kolthoum sang, Youssef Chahine directed, and Nasser was the all-singing, all-dancing leader of the "Arab street" who faced down western colonialism at Suez in 1956 and swaggered across the world stage. Then came the oil explosion of the 1970s, and the Gulf states suddenly found themselves with a load of petro-dollars at their disposal. Over the next couple of decades, with Lebanon mired in civil war and Egypt rocked by the assassination of Sadat and the beginning of the moribund, bureaucratic rule of Mubarak, Saudi Arabia (and to a lesser extent the UAE) embarked on an ambitious and eye-wateringly expensive programme to force control of the region's culture away from their rivals.

The Arab culture wars are open on a number of different fronts, but all involve Egypt losing its grip on the Middle East's cultural tiller. On television, for example, Egyptian soaps and serials have long dominated prime-time schedules, but now the UAE is fighting back with multimillion dollar productions like Million's Poet, an insanely popular reality TV show that commands 70 million viewers from across the Arab World, yet is based around an obscure form of Gulf Arabian poetry. The result has been a hitherto unknown appreciation for the Gulf dialect across the Middle East. The whole show is funded by the Abu Dhabi Authority of Culture and Heritage, and forms part of a much wider push to make Abu Dhabi the capital of culture in the Middle East, with local versions of the Louvre and Guggenheim under construction.

It's not just a matter of the Gulf producing new cultural products to rival Egypt's; investors are actively taking over Egyptian cultural institutions and reshaping them to reflect more conservative Gulf values. Egypt's film studios were managing to produce only about five or six films a year in the early 1990s; now, almost solely because of Saudi investment, they're churning out around 40, some of which now have to conform to the "35 rules" of piety laid down by the Saudi backers – a huge shift away from Egypt's traditionally more pluralistic Islamic values to the much more austere form of Wahhabi Islam prevalent in the Gulf. This "Saudisation" has left some Egyptians, such as the billionaire communications tycoon Naguib Sawiris, feeling like a foreigner in their own land. "As far as I'm concerned, this is the biggest problem in the Middle East right now," he says. "Egypt was always very liberal, very secular and very modern. Now ... I'm looking at my country, and it's not my country any longer. I feel like an alien here."

As the IslamOnline workers prepare themselves for a second night of occupation in an attempt to assert their editorial independence over those that bankroll them, a broader upheaval is under way in every corner of the Arab media world, one that could prove dangerous for cultural pluralism. "There is an Egyptian taste to IslamOnline at the moment which is very discernible; if the site packs up and moves to Qatar the spirit and attitude of the site will change," says Khalil al-Anani, an expert on political Islam at Durham University. "That would be a big loss to the Muslim community globally, because we are facing a wave of Salafist media at the moment – on the internet, on satellite TV, and elsewhere – and IslamOnline was one of the key outlets resisting that trend."

[Al-khiyal]

مستقبل "إسلام أونلاين"

يقول تقرير الجارديان: "إن شكوكا تعتري مستقبل أحد أكبر المواقع الإسلامية على شبكة الإنترنت، وذلك مع تصاعد الخلاف بين المدراء في قطر والموظفين في مصر."

ويضيف التقرير، الذي ترفقه الصحيفة على موقعها على الإنترنت برابط فيديو للاعتصام الذي شارك فيه المئات من موظفي الموقع في مصر، قائلا: "إن الموظفين يتهمون المدراء الجدد بمحاولة اختطاف الموقع لكي يروجوا من خلاله لبرنامج (أجندة) متشددة ومحافظة."

صحيفة التايمز هي الأخرى تنشر تقريرا عن الموضوع جاء بعنوان: "إسلام أونلاين يواجه الانهيار بعد تمرٌّد موظفي القاهرة على الضغط الديني."

ينقل تقرير التايمز عن أحد المشاركين في اعتصام القاهرة قوله: "من المحتمل ألاَّ يكون هنالك إسلام أونلاين يوم الأحد، إذ سيكون المبنى خاليا."

[Al-khiyal]

Deena Khalil:
IslamOnline was more than a job

March 17, 2010 -- I’ve only been working here for 4 months, but I’ve grown so attached to this place. I’m trying to fathom what it means to work somewhere for 5, 7, and some even 10 years only to find out that over the course of 24 hours that in a couple of weeks it will be gone. This is the state of so many of those working at IslamOnline, the most well-known Islamic website in English. This week started off just like any other; on Sunday we came to work, we had meetings, we decided on the events we would be covering that week – Al-Aqsa, of course, was at the top of the list. Little did we know that by Monday we would all be out of jobs, and the project we were all so passionate about would be hijacked by people whose agendas we do not know.

We had been hearing rumors for over a month about new management that had recently joined the Al-Balagh organization in Qatar, the entity through which IslamOnline receives its funding, and were planning on making some “changes.” Over the course of the past several weeks rumors abounded. We heard that for financial reasons the company would be restructured and that would result in mass layoffs. We heard that the new management was unhappy that the website was delving into issues like health, homosexuality, art and youth, and wanted the content to revolve totally around Islam. The woman that cleans the bathroom on my floor went to ask for a loan and was told she might not even get paid that month. They started cutting back on “luxury expenses” like milk and toilet paper. We heard they were Wahabis and were developing a new editorial policy that would go against IslamOnline’s current editorial policies. The current editorial policy can be summarized in the following statement:

Islam is a way of life and seeps into every aspect of a Muslim’s life, and thus, the site’s content should reflect that We, the editors of IslamOnline.net and all its subsidiary websites, hold strong to the Qur’anic verse that says “Thus we have created you a community of the middle way” (Al-Baqarah 2:143). We are passionate about Islam, and we are passionate about the Islamic principle of moderation in all things. We are not here just because this is our job, we are here because we believe in this message, and we love this message, and we want to contribute to its being heard.

I can safely say that the overwhelming majority of IoL workers, from managers to editors to journalists to everyone else, has lived every minute in this company based on this statement. IoL is not a normal company. This place has so much heart, it really did feel like one big family. After we began protesting on Monday, the first demand on the list was that none of us will leave until every single person gets there financial rights, and those whose salaries are less than 1000 EGP must get the equivalent of an entire year’s salary. There are workers that come and clean the building at night after we leave, people we’ve never seen, but we’ve been told they have no formal documents in the company. We are trying to ensure that these people also get compensation for being let go. There were people that had been working here since the website started over 10 years ago. There are couples that met, got married, and had children while both worked here; and their children would spend the day in the daycare room. I can only imagine what those couples are going through now, after finding out that they are both about to lose their jobs.

We sent letter after letter to Qatar, asking them for more information, telling them what we’ve been hearing and asking them to show us the respect we deserve by informing us what’s going on. We sent a letter to Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi that contained over 250 signatures from IoL workers, asking for the facts. To make a long story short, a series of events followed that led us to Monday morning. It started off as a normal day, it’s time to pray the dhuhr prayer so we go to pray, and when we come back, we see that some workers have gathered in the entrance of the building to strike in protest against something we are not yet aware of. Word spread and we found out that Qatar had sent a committee currently on the top floor conducting some kind of business, the nature of this business differed depending on who you asked. The more information we gained about the committee, the more we realized how important it was for us to continue the strike. The committee made mishap after mishap, insulting major figures in the company, attempting to fire one of the strike instigators, and generally coming off as liars with no integrity. Towards the end of the workday, we finally learned what Qatar had known for months but refused to tell us: The contract between Al-Balagh organization and the other organization that own the building we were working in ends March 31st, and would not be renewed. Instead, all IoL operations would be transferred to Qatar, and all current employees would be let go. During the sit-in, one girl stood up and told everyone that a gross violation is happening now in Al-Aqsa, and while IslamOnline would usually be a top source for Muslims to get coverage of this event, instead we’re busy with this committee from Qatar and we’re not even allowed access to the site. We should not forget that.

We are currently protesting for several reasons:

1. We want the financial rights of every single person in the company

2. We want the world to know that these editors and journalists and workers you see striking are the true voice of moderation. Without them, who knows what IslamOnline will be like, we are all praying that the voice of moderation is preserved. But if it is not, we want everyone to know that these are not the same people that have been running IoL for the past 10 years.

3. We are protesting against 10 years of effort and talent and experience that might quite possibly all go to waste in the near future.

4. We are protesting for the fact that they blocked our access to the server and have rendered us unable to cover what’s going on in Al-Aqsa.

We need the prayers and support of everyone that we can stand up again on our feet, without the help of Al-Balagh, and continue to voice the Islam of moderation we are so passionate about.

[Al-khiyal]

IslamOnline: Replaced already?

March 17, 2010 -- As the crisis at IslamOnline continued into its third day on Wednesday, striking workers expressed anger that the influential Islamic website’s Qatar-based parent company had already begun moving on without them. Striker Fathi Abu Hatab said the website’s Arabic-language page had begun being updated with fresh material today. “That means they've already hired new people in Qatar,” he said. Nevertheless, he added, “We're still working. We haven't left the organization yet.” The website’s English-language portal, meanwhile, has remained unchanged since employees walked off the job Monday. Abu Hatab said most of his colleagues were willing to continue providing content for the website - especially coverage of the ongoing clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces in East Jerusalem - even while working the picket line in shifts. “To supply this content is very important to us,” Abu Hatab said. “We haven’t resigned yet.” But given the circumstances, mass resignations seem all but inevitable at this point - the only thing left is to hammer out final details of financial severance packages. Abu Hatab said most of his colleagues were simply unwilling to work under the new board of the Islamic Message Society, the Qatari NGO that funds the site. According to several current and former employees of IslamOnline’s Cairo newsroom, the board has begun imposing editorial restrictions that are designed, they say, to portray a narrowly-focused conservative Islamic vision. The rapid appearance of new content from Qatar on Wednesday may indicate that the new board - having judged the Cairo office to be insubordinate - was determined to purge the newsroom and start over, either here or in Qatar.

[Al-khiyal]

IslamOnline staffers win?

March 17, 2010 -- The saga of IslamOnline took an abrupt 11th hour turn Wednesday night - apparently in favor for the more than 200 staffers who walked off their jobs and had mostly resigned themselves to leaving the influential Islamic news website. Strikers were informed around 9 PM that an emergency meeting had been held of the Islamic Message Society, the Qatar-based religious NGO that funds the site. The board voted to suspend the authority of two new members who striking staffers viewed as the primary reasons behind rising newsroom tensions that eventually led to the staff walk-out.

Striker Ahmed Abdel Fattah said board members Ali el-Amady and Ibrahim Ansari had been temporarily suspended and their authorities revoked. “Those two are the reasons for all of what has happened to us,” Abdel Fattah said. “They’ve been destroying IslamOnline.” Abdel Fattah said his colleagues were jubilant, but he pointed out that no official decision has been announced as the status of the striking workers. “Until that happens, there’s optimism, but cautious optimism.” The protest, as of time of writing, continues as journalists demand the return of website administration powers to Cairo, after their access was blocked earlier by the Doha-based management.