Am I the only long-term Deenporter who is dismayed with the tone the conversation on that site has started taking recently? There are two big problems: one of them is that, any time a discussion strays onto “difficult” or emotive topics, before long the entire discussion thread gets deleted. The other is that the place has been invaded by trolls, who seem intent on stirring up “debate” between Deobandis and Bareilawis again. This always leads to a poisonous atmosphere and has ruined many a forum in the past, which is why it used to be banned on DeenPort.

When I first started posting, the mere mention of those two names was strongly discouraged if not banned, and that was because previous forums many of us had been on (notably the old ASFA forum) had been totally run into the ground, even though it actually wasn’t run by either Deobandis or Bareilawis but rather Hisham Kabbani’s group (As-Sunnah Foundation of America, hence ASFA). The actual differences between the two groups are not that great in terms of beliefs; what is at stake is history, namely what certain Muslim scholars in India may have said or written round about a century or more ago — that’s what it all hinges on. Of course, no amount of forum debate between ordinary Muslims is going to bring the two groups together; all it will do is cause more and more bitterness and drown out any debate over any other issue.

Many of the younger generation of Muslims in the UK in the 1990s wanted to get away from all of that, which is why so many turned to Arabic-speaking scholars from Jordan and Syria, and the convert scholars like Shaikh Nuh Keller and Hamza Yusuf, at that time. People didn’t want to have to keep their friends in one group secret from the other, and they wanted an end to situations like what happened in Streatham round about 2000, where there was a scuffle in the mosque at Jumu’ah, a mass exit, and a couple of weeks later a change in the committee with a hardline Deobandi imam appointed. As with the newly-established circles like LightStudy in London, DeenPort attracted people from both sides and neither. Quality of discussion was generally very high, particularly after the full names policy was implemented.

Of course, many of us knew each other, or at least knew of each other, in the early days from various forums or email lists, or from places like Q-News or some Islamic society or other from the 1990s or early 2000s. Some of the newer arrivals aren’t part of the old club, but that should not matter as long as they play by the rules. However, there have been those who have used multiple sock-puppet identities and tried to raise “difficult questions” as a means to get people to pointlessly debate divisive issues, and used some of the old tactics of the Deobandi and (particularly) Bareilawi sectarians, such as claiming that this or that non-Indian scholar endorsed this or that of their own group’s policies. Today, for example, someone claimed that the brother of Habib Omar (a well-renowned scholar from Hadramaut in Yemen) endorsed Husam al-Haramain, a document in which scholars in Makkah agreed with the founder of the Bareilawi group that several of the Deobandi leaders were outside of Islam for things they had supposedly written (but denied writing) about the Prophet, sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam. The guy who said this didn’t name the brother, but claimed he had a copy of “the sealed fatwa” and, when pressed, simply said “the comments were made”.

These changes have all happened since the site owner, Omar Tufail, turned over responsibility for monitoring the discussion to the users. Previously, there were set rules, and if you broke them, your post got deleted and you could eventually get banned. Now, people vote posts up or down, and if a post gets enough negative votes, it gets deleted. The number of negative votes required depends on someone’s standing, so a post from a newcomer is much more likely to get deleted than a post from someone who’s been around for a while, and a newcomer cannot cast a negative vote either. The person who started the thread can also delete the whole thread, even if there are dozens of posts in a thread (although sometimes, the person who started a deleted thread denied deleting it).

The problem here is not just that bickering is allowed to continue. The problem is not just that people cast negative votes on posts they just disagree with, rather than those which are offensive or inappropriate. The problem is also that threads seem to get deleted every time they stray into “difficult” or emotive issues even when the tone of the discussion remains positive. There was one recent thread which started when someone revealed that a prominent former Muslim blogger was now an atheist, and there was some speculation as to what might have prompted this, and someone from his former community posted a clarification. The conversation didn’t get at all acrimonious — certainly, nothing like as much as Deobandi-Bareilawi debates get — but it got deleted anyway. Another attempt to continue that discussion led to that thread getting deleted.

I might well write another post on that issue and on some of what came out of that discussion, but it is clear to me that DeenPort isn’t anything like what it used to be and that the present system for moderating posts isn’t working. There is too much fitna (trouble, dissension) and attempts to introduce fitna, while legitimate debate is labelled fitna and suppressed. At the very least, the rule stopping Deobandi-Bareilawi fighting should be enforced again, and the system of posts automatically disappearing when they get sufficient negative votes should go: at the very least, some sort of committee should decide if the post should indeed be deleted. The site used to be a refuge and a safe space where mainstream Sunni Muslims could debate things of relevance to them; its status as that is rapidly disappearing as the atmosphere has got somewhat more negative.

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