The plagiarism controversy

Visitors to Sunni Sister will have noticed the recent controversy over the unauthorised copying of a number of articles from Modern Muslima and various other websites run by Saraji Umm Zaid. Visitors to those sites will be aware of her unfortunate decision to remove all the original articles from the site, and post a message explaining why.

I think it’s a bad decision, and an over-reaction akin to burning down a house to rid it of mice. A lot of the mice will escape when they see the fire, and you’ll have no house. In this case, people who want (or need) to read the articles will, instead, go to the unauthorised copy instead. The author will still receive the thawaab for writing it – in fact, the more her articles spread, with or without her permission, the more Muslims can receive the knowledge imparted therein, possibly without even hearing of the author’s own website. And, in any case, if you put articles up anywhere, there is a risk of them being copied; the only way to avoid this is not to publish them in the first place.

This, of course, doesn’t excuse the bad adab (at best) of people who carry out unauthorised copying. Worse still, Saraji complained of people copying her works and Wahhabifying them. But what’s new? Wahhabis are known to have doctored classical texts by the likes of Imam Nawawi, so why do you think they wouldn’t doctor your (or my) articles? They are known to have published books containing fabricated hadeeth and profoundly offensive doctrines, as Shaikh Nuh told us in his well-known articles and lectures. I have seen plagiarised texts on, for one thing, countering Christian missionaries (in this example, it appeared to be a crudely Islamised article originally written by a Jew).

Apart from this, I think there’s a real need for a repository of Islamic articles promoting authentic Islamic belief and practice. Perhaps this is what the people responsible for republishing Saraji’s articles wanted to do, although it’s the wrong way to go about it. But the repository does need to contain articles, not links to articles which may disappear when the authors move host, or lose their internet access, or whatever. The authors may well be grateful for this repository when their host’s web server goes down and takes their work with it, or they botch an upgrade to their blogging or portal software, both of which have happened to me since I’ve been at my current host. I’ve recovered numerous articles on my blog from Google’s caché. Google has its critics and been accused of issuing spyware, but on that occasion I was grateful for the caché being there, even though they hadn’t asked me before storing my articles.