Nothing like it

By Tarek Atia

If anything, the "suralikeit" controversy revealed that on the world wide web, where issues of accountability and free speech are still being determined, anyone attempting to control the flow of information may be on an impossible mission.

Consider this: Until a few days ago, had you surfed an Internet web site located at http://members.aol.com/suralikeit, it might have felt like you were stumbling onto a playground-style, "My religion is better than yours" cat fight. Today, visitors to the site will find no evidence of that crusades-style battle, just the rather innocent message: "The requested URL was not found on this server".

The reason: On 24 June, backing down in the face of pressure from Muslims around the globe, America OnLine (AOL) closed down "suralikeit", the site which had purported to respond to a verse from Surat Al-Baqqarah which challenges man to compose a work as wise and poetic as the Qur'an. The anonymous web site author provided a cut-and-paste job of Qur'anic verses with certain words replaced so as to make it sound like Muslims will be going to hell. The fake suras were also translated into English.

The web site's author did not include his e-mail address on the site, as is the custom in cyberspace. However, at one point, the anonymous author did post a new message indicating that an increase in visitors had inspired him to "create some mirror sites" using other Internet addresses so that the traffic buildup on the site wouldn't be too bad.

That sudden rush of visitors to the otherwise obscure "suralikeit" address can be traced to the countless e-mails and "action alerts" (a term coined by the Washington DC-based Council on American Islamic Relations [CAIR]) that were being sent out via a vast network of Muslims on-line around the globe. Initially curious, surfers in Egypt and elsewhere checked it out and quickly became angered and hurt by what they saw.

Most Muslim groups urged restraint in responding to the offensive site. "At the end of the day we don't want to create another Salman Rushdie," one newsletter warned. Carefully worded letters of complaint were sent to AOL. Someone called the papers, and a flood of articles, editorials and letters to the editor began to appear, some deeming "suralikeit" part of a worldwide plan to denigrate Islam.

Within a week an AOL spokeswoman announced, "We have removed that page. Our terms of service are very clear on what we call appropriate content, such as content which is defamatory in nature. This page had that. It was particularly targeting Islam."

But even as those words were spoken the cyber-terrorist was keeping his promise: within a few days, the site was found at a new location, this time on Geocities, a service provider that offers free web space on the net.

AOL's decision to keep silent about the identity of the "suralikeit" author makes it easy for the author or authors of the material to set up shop on another server elsewhere on the web. Reuters acknowledges that, and so does Dr M Deeb, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Alberta. He posted the following onto his widely circulated e-mail list: "Do you think AOL's so-called "policy on privacy" should be taken at face value? Does AOL invoke the technical leeway of privacy to give the "mystery" authors another chance to pursue their libelous activity elsewhere and, in so doing, to achieve the authors' and AOL's anti-Muslim and anti-Arab objectives?"

A potential Kafkaesque mouse hunt had begun. Was "suralikeit" anywhere else on the web? How many other sites featured similarly offensive content? Was it worth tracking them all down? Actually, the number of web sites that blatantly or indirectly defame some nation, race, creed, corporation or individual is mind-boggling, akin to when a search engine informs you there are 8,734,567,890 documents that match your search. The ramifications of such an open battleground, where anyone can say anything, where pornography, fraud and defamation are literally right around the corner, are still being determined.

Although everyone seems to acknowledge that the lack of any real institutional control or rules on free speech on the Internet is risky, no one seems to know what to do about it.

While an Al-Azhar spokesman was confidant that the "khozaabalat" or mad concoctions of the "suralikeit" web master were "nothing to worry about, since after all these years, this isn't going to change the Qur'an," Al-Azhar President Ahmed Omar Hashem was still considering whether to file a lawsuit against AOL.

But how many service or content providers can you sue in an amorphous world where tens of thousands of new sites are born every single day? In fact, a recent US Supreme Court decision fell heavily in favour of AOL in a similar, but more individualised, defamation incident. The court upheld the 1996 Communications Decency Act which gives on-line firms immunity from liability for information that originates with third parties. In other words, "computer service providers may not be held liable for defamatory material posted on their systems."

Relying on court protection may not be as effective as setting up your own web site and joining the fray. CAIR's action alert on "suralikeit" says that one of the things that can be learned from this incident is that "Muslim interests are best served through a proactive campaign in which accurate information about Islam and Muslims is offered to counter inaccurate, stereotypical or offensive material."

In fact, Al-Azhar used its own well-established web site as a forum for a response to "suralikeit", while other Muslim organisations on-line have provided translations of Al-Azhar's response as well as several articles published in the Egyptian press about the incident.

At Sunday's opening session of Al-Azhar's conference on extremism and violence, those terms were defined by Al-Azhar's Grand Sheikh as comprising anything that assaults or attempts to destroy another human being's dignity.

Whether or not the West or its media appear to have something against Islam will become clearer as global dependence on information increases. Just last week, in addition to "suralikeit", CAIR dealt with what it perceived to be slanders against Islam in the Baltimore Sun newspaper and on the TV show 60 Minutes.

Dealing with traditional and newer media outlets is still an uphill battle for Muslims. AOL's decision to remove the "suralikeit" site might have been a legitimate victory on the ground, but the kind of free speech provided by the Internet has merely opened up a new Pandora's box of ill-informed and groundless assaults on Islam, and everything else under the sun.