OK, so we’ve all seen that the person formerly known as Umm Zaid has dispensed some of her “pearls of wisdom” - a list of stereotypical blog topics that, supposedly, are all we Muslim bloggers ever write about (toxic waste dumping off Africa and patients’ lives being put at risk by exhausted doctors employed by cost-cutting contractors in the British health service weren’t listed, and for that matter, neither were responses to articles attacking Muslim women in British national newspapers). The article then disappeared (although it got reposted here), and was replaced by a post basically saying we all had lost our sense of humour. Well, where have I heard that before? (More: Izzy Mo.)
It would be a waste of time to respond to each of the points one by one, except to say that I do write about a lot more, that even though some of these debates have indeed been done to death over the years, there are sometimes reasons to talk about them again (such as when a British politician discloses information about Muslim women who visit him which should have been kept private, leading to a front-page hate campaign against Muslim women in niqaab) and that some of them are just caricatures of what people have actually said (the natural parenting reference is one example). However, I do wish to address the point of why Muslim bloggers don’t do much actual religious blogging, and that blogs which concentrate on religious topics go dead.
To begin with, some blogs do cover religious topics without going dead - Muslim Matters is one example, although I do admit that the religious topics get less comments than other posts (Yasir Qadhi’s recent post about being a “Mac convert” has 212 comments at the time of writing, while the religious posts that are on the front page have between 10 and 25 comments each). Perhaps the reason most ordinary Muslims have nothing to say in reply to an online lecture is that they really do not approach the level of learning of the person delivering it, so they do not feel qualified to respond. They may simply agree with it; people generally comment when they are particularly enthused, have something to add, or disagree with it (or with a comment on the post itself). As for Muslim Matters, many of us may follow the political and community aspects of that blog, but disagree with many aspects of its religious stance.
However, most people are not scholars, and not really entitled to dispense too much religious advice and admonition to others, let alone impart “Sufi wisdom”, and if they did so, it would most likely be in the form of cut-and-pasted lectures and articles from elsewhere, which would arouse the ire of people who held that their precious copyright had been infringed (ring any bells?) and besides, we all remember the “cut and paste” era and don’t want to go back to it anyway. Why would anyone read a blog which was full of unqualified religious opinion, or full of articles copied from other websites? This is why Muslim blogs tend to contain more worldly content, as a rule.
After people got offended, and said it was baloney from beginning to end (uh, that was me), she then pulled the “where’s your sense of humour?” trick out. Well, that’s a common response to anyone who objects when someone tells a malicious joke, or humiliates them, or rips five years’ work up in front of them and throws it at their feet like so much junk. It’s every school or office bully’s trump card. I can take a joke, but it does have to be funny, and this isn’t.
This is, however.
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