Egyptian Gumbo

So I’m no longer writing for Islamonline.net. I was fired hehe. They like to call it “Administrative Changes” I wasn’t very comfortable referring people to that site anyway because of the questionable material and fatawee they had. Why exactly am I not writing for them anymore? read on…

Here was my first (and last) article I wrote for them:
Seeking the Highest

And just to give you some examples of the problems I saw:

1. When I turned in my first article they took out about 4 or 5 hadith that I used to support what I was saying. They said that Youth don’t like a lot of Quran and Hadith because it’s “Preachy.” To be honest, that’s really sad. The people who go to read Islamic articles online, aren’t really the ones who are completely lost. Also it supported what I said, and gave my words more credibility. So that was strike number one.

2. The way they edited my article: I was not made aware of the changes they had made to my article until after it was published. There were a couple of things, but the thing that surprised me the most was this sentence: “If you work toward haram goals in this world, your ultimate goal is lost; the goal of attaining Al-Firdaws; seeking Allah’s grace.”

They had changed “Seeking Allah’s FACE to grace” hmm no, I specifically meant Face. (Jallah wa 3ala.) Which tells me there’s a little bit of denying Allah’s names and attributes going on there. Although there is nothing wrong with seeking Allah’s grace, I’d rather not have people edit my articles as such.

3. They tried to control all email content! (which is actually the reason I believe they let me go):
If you look under the articles they have a generic email address. I asked them how I can check the email that gets sent to me or where it gets forwarded to, and they told me that it’s policy that they don’t let their writers have access to the emails. Instead, they will forward the emails to the writer if it is addressed to them. They also mentioned that they like to “See the feedback, and see how their writers are doing.”

That was strange to me. I’ve never seen any newspaper or magazine or company in general monitor the emails.

If that wasn’t enough:

4. They made me CC them when I would reply to the emails that would be sent to me. It was like Big Brother. Why do they need to see the naseeha that I’m giving to the youth? They come to me for advice and I give it to them.

I kept questioning their policies. And apparently they didn’t like that

Anyway with that said: Me, my sister, and a friend of mine were planning on starting a blog for the youth. Just in Baton Rouge alone, we have around 30 girls that regularly come to the Youth Halaqa every Friday night at the masjid. However, I’d like to make this blog something for all youth. It’ll be awesome, inshaAllah.

More updates on that soon inshaAllah.

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