Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Blog of Arabia
Monday, February 12, 2007

One of my favorite memories from my trip to Iran a few years with my wife, which is described in WHERE GOD WAS BORN, was sitting in an Internet cafe watching a woman with fake fingernails emailing her lover, in English, across the country. (Yes, I admit, I read over her shoulder.) The Internet is, of course, highly regulated across the Arab world, but bloggers do have increasing power. The AP rounds up the situation:

Mideast governments for decades have dominated the media, trying to keep a monopoly on information and deter criticism of authorities. But bloggers are chipping away, writing about everything from human rights to the region's rulers to the most taboo topic - Islam.

Weblogs - or blogs for short - started taking off in the Mideast a few years ago as access to the Internet and technology for creating sites grew. There are now hundreds of Arabic- and Farsi-language blogs posted from the Middle East.

Many of the blogs are just personal musings. But many others strive to tackle political and social issues, and their authors are increasingly getting into trouble, with governments blocking their sites and throwing them in jail.

"I firmly believe that blogs now with normal people using them have become the fifth estate. They watch the watchers, especially in this area of the world, because there are no controls over them," said Mahmood al-Yousif, a Bahraini blogger.

Al-Yousif said his blog was blocked by authorities briefly last year after he published articles about an election-related scandal on the Persian Gulf island kingdom.

One interesting stat: Reporters Without Borders has five Mideast countries - Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Syria - on its list of the globe's 13 worst Internet freedom enemies that block Web sites and detain bloggers.

And another: Though the number of Internet users has grown nearly fivefold since 2000, only about 10 percent of the region's people have access to the Internet, according to the online Internet World Stats, which monitors Web usage around the world.

Labels: Middle East, Technology

Posted by B Feiler at 7:05 AM
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