On February 6, 2009, an Egyptian-German graduate student known for his coverage of the situation in Gaza was mysteriously abducted by Egyptian state security forces. Within days, just as mysteriously as he was abducted, he was returned to his family. Reportedly his release was due to the intense pressure put on the government to secure his release. The German embassy reportedly intervened on Rizk’s behalf. However, the state generally resents and disregards foreign government intervention on behalf of dual-citizens. On the other hand, immediately after he was abducted, Facebook status lines called for his release, petitions circulated, protests were organized and groups were created to push for his release. One group reportedly reached 7,000 members in just a few days. Could Facebook have been the source of the “intense pressure” that secured Rizk’s release? Facebook is reported to be the third most visited website from Egyptian computers (Katz). As of January 2009, 800,000 Egyptians were Facebook users – a number that represents 9% of all internet users in Egypt (Shapiro). It is considered such a risk that at one point in 2008 the Egyptian government was reportedly considering blocking access in Egypt (Mansour). In 2001, Pippa Norris predicted that the internet would provide “a global platform for opposition movements challenging autocratic regimes.” (6) The informal networks created by digital technologies such as social networking sites can support and expand civil society. On the other hand, skeptics, who felt that the Internet would play little or no role in promoting development, argued that the internet merely “engages the already engaged” while pessimists like Peter Golding (2000) contended that the internet merely reinforces existing social, political and economic divides. It is the position of this author that social networking sites like Facebook do provide an alternative channel for civic engagement, a virtual Habermasian public sphere of sorts. (Salter) But, unlike those Keohane and Nye (1998) labeled “prophets of the new cyberworld”, this author acknowledges the limitations due to economic reality and political structures. (82) The success of Facebook as a tool of political mobilization depends on how many Egyptians can participate and how many are willing to take the risks involved with participating. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of Facebook’s potential as a channel of civic engagement for Egyptian political activists operating in a restrictive and reactionary environment. The analysis applies Mario Diani’s (2001) criteria for investigating the role of virtual social movement networks.

For Moroccan youths, cyberspace has emerged as a useful tool where political, social, and economic grievances are publicly circulated without state censorship. YouTube has, at least partially, helped rural and urban Moroccan youth reclaim the counter hegemonic spaces traditionally regulated by the state. Hip-hop music has become a common form of expression among the youth. Through hip-hop music, posted on YouTube, young artists contest their socio-economic marginalization and challenge state subjugating policies. YouTube dissolves the barriers of traditional state media allowing individuals to participate in a virtual public sphere that benefits from the global discourse of human rights and transcend the traditional regulation of the Moroccan media. I argue that despite the fact that YouTube is thought to be a counter hegemonic force, its threat to state’s control of youth resistance is minimal. For the state, this youth movement is not as threatening as it looks. Like Nass El Ghiwane and Lamchaheb, two contesting popular musical movements of the 1970s which relied partly on cassettes tape to disseminate its message, the emerging appropriation of young hip-hop singers by government agencies limits the power of YouTube as a space of contestation given the change of hip hop culture from a cyber protest to a business choice governed by global marketing strategies. This capitalist domestication engineered by state as integral part of its culture of festivalization would transform the styles and themes of the contesting discourse of Moroccan hip hop, its production, and its circulation.

Every travel is a journey of the mind that implicates physical and temporal displacement. In Arabic, several words represent the complexity of the subject of Muslim travelling: hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), hijra (emigration), rihla (travel for learning and other purposes) and ziyara (visits to shrines). Among these forms of travelling, the hajj is the highest expression of Islam and its greatest public rite. Pilgrimage in Islam is both a collective and a personal experience that emphasizes the unity of the umma before Allah. From a literary point of view, the journey to Mecca has represented always a central theme both in Islamic and Christian travel writing. However over recent years the number of Europeans and in particular Germans who converted to Islam and travelled to Mecca has increased, as well as the rate of European travel agencies specialized in Hajj and Umrah. In the study of Islam in the West, a new field is represented by those Europeans and Americans who have converted to Islam and reflected on this process through literary production. Recent studies have called into question the usefulness of conversion accounts. That is why, bearing that criticism in mind, I do not investigate on conversion accounts but on literary aspects and cultural significance of contemporary pilgrimage accounts by German Muslims. These narratives embody the issues faced by Western Muslims living in their home countries, as well as the representation of Western societies and German people in the Middle East. This is significant because it reflects a shift in the way Westerners have regarded the “Orient” in the post-colonial period, and it paves a new ground in what it means to be or to become Muslim at the present time. This paper aims to analyze the way both contemporary German pilgrimage narratives and the blogosphere play a fundamental role in building a bridge that connects Muslim immigrants living in the Diaspora with German converts. In other words the pilgrimage becomes an occasion for sharing a collective experience that provides the opportunity for a social exchange and the building of a Muslim identity without any distinction of the nationality, gender and race.

Religious traditions ascribe specific religious ontological statuses to bodies which results in a ‘religionation’ of bodies. In light of the importance of bodies for one’s self-experience of others, for the production and reflection of social meanings, and as the subject and object of power relations (Douglas), meanings attached to bodies determine what can or cannot be done to them, in life and in death. Ethico-religious, social and physical segregation of ‘religionated’ bodies often finds religious justifications in the theological or religio-legal realms, hence the importance of looking at some Islamic legal opinions (fatwas) that pertain to bodies. While contemporary medico-ethical values are shaping a new Islamic paradigm (Moosa), pre-modern traditional Islamic paradigms – grounded in ‘mythical cognitive systems’ (Arkoun) or ‘premodern epistemes’ (Moosa) – survive and help us explain some of the dissonance that appears in various contemporary rulings. One may, however, ask to what extent have bodies remained ‘religionated’ in the developing corpus of contemporary fatwas with regards to new medical issues, e.g., blood and organ donation, organ transplants, or dissection of cadavers for medical training? I will look at a few (‘authoritative’) contemporary Sunni (IslamOnline.net) and Shiite fatwas (Grand Ayatollahs al-Sistani and al-Khamenei) available online to illustrate how the ‘religionation’ of bodies provides varying ontological natures to bodies. These fatwas grant different legal statuses that reiterate distinct ontological natures that have everything to do with what Daly identified as the reaffirmation of social relations that aim at maintaining boundaries. In life and in death, bodies partake in a specific ethico-religious ontological system that determines the sanctity of the body of individuals: they are not all equally worthy of the same sanctity. Some Sunnis are willing, in some cases (e.g., blood donation), to entertain ideas of ‘de-religionated’ bodies, but other rulings use pre-modern notions of bodies that attribute varying (on account of the fluid normative nature of rulings) degrees of sanctity to differently ‘religionated’ bodies, with some contemporary rulings being quite explicit: ‘religionated’ bodies and individuals are not to be treated the same. The same is true of the Shiite context when scholars tackle similar contemporary medical issues, sometimes reaching opposite conclusions to the ones provided by Sunni jurists. Some rulings, e.g., on anatomical dissections, nonetheless, illustrate how, even in death, remains of bodies retain their ‘religionated’ ontological natures and need to be treated differently.

In recent years, digitization projects have emerged rapidly in Europe and North America, making millions of books, newspaper articles, and journals accessible through online databases. In the Middle East and North Africa, however, this access to digital information is still limited, and digital images of books and journals in the Arabic language are sparse. This lack of access to information presents far-reaching implications for Middle Eastern society. This paper intends to show how a digitization movement could increase the equality of access to resources as well as outlining the legal and political challenges that must be overcome in order to implement such an online database. In many MENA countries, the contrast between urban and rural life is reflected in access to extensive collections of printed materials. Digitization would extend access to educational resources to every person, regardless of location, age, or socioeconomic background. It would help to close the gap between rural and urban, while giving people a stake in their cultural heritage. Digitizing Arabic books and articles will actively preserve the rich intellectual and cultural history of the Arab nations. The role of digitization projects to preserve cultural heritage is demonstrated in Europe through the Europeana project, aimed at preserving European heritage in all its diversity. Before such a project could move forward, issues of copyright law and effective protection of intellectual property would need to be thoroughly examined, politically and legally. These laws and regulations are crucial to the development of a thriving information society. A related challenge is the manner in which such a resource might be regulated, whether through public or private libraries or through non-profit organizations. Using Jordan as our primary case study, we will show how this kind of digital resource could fill a need in Middle Eastern society. We will draw on the data collected from interviews with Jordanian librarians, politicians, and local leaders in addition to general data on the number of libraries and the distribution of access to materials throughout the country. Access to educational and cultural materials promotes literacy, encourages civic engagement, and creates entrepreneurial advantages for everyone in a society. Building an online library or database of journals, newspapers, and books will enhance the lives of everyone in the community in addition to increasing possibilities for intercultural exchange of information, building bridges within and between cultures through equal access to information and ideas.