Today, with the development in Information Technology, reaching to far and near is very easy and cost effective. This is a grace of Allah. This tool need to be exploited by the followers of Islam to reach to the remote and spread the light of Allah that was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad –peace be upon him.

Word Wide Web is an ocean of information, accessible to a vast number of people on this globe. It is an inexpensive method to get access to human knowledge. However, the greatest truth mankind ever knew (i.e., Islam) does not have wide representation on the net. It is because of the negligence and incompetence of Today’s Muslims. Today’s Muslims are great in numbers, but not so great in quality. And this is why Islam is not leading the mankind today. But I am sure, this is only a temporary situation which is not meant to last for long. Muslim nation is passing an illness state where it needs some time to get into a healthy state. It has to complete a rehabilitation period.

In this article, I try to collect few ideas which could be applied to promote Islam in cyber space. Contribution to cyber space does not require money and high skill sets, and it is feasible on individual basis. With huge population of Muslims, if only 50% of them engage in e-Dawah (preaching Islam in Internet), then I am sure it is going to change the attitude of internet audience, and thousands of ignorant sheep will get back to their master.
 

Pre-Requisites of e-Dawah

Acquire Knowledge:
The first step in e-Dawah, is to acquire knowledge and know the right from wrong. A Muslim can not proceed with Dawah if he does not know the fundamentals of Islam. An empty vessel will yield nothing. One has to know the fundamentals of Islam first, then whatever he knows, he should disseminate.

Prioritize Knowledge:
Very important for e-Dawah, is to prioritize Islamic knowledge, and know the majority of the audience. If the majority of the audience is non-Muslim, there should be an approach, if they are Muslims there should be different approach.

Dawah with Wisdom:
Wisdom is God gift, who does not have, surely looses a precious thing, and who has, has the greatest gift. It is the wisdom which makes a person attracted to Islam, and it is the lack of Wisdom which makes a person run-away from Islam.

It is very important in e-Dawah to present Islam in a form that the audience understands and appreciates.

Adhere to Quran and Sunnah:
The best knowledge is the one that adheres to Quran and Sunnah in the way that our predecessors understood them. Any incidence happens today, or might happen till dooms day has a solution in Quran and Sunnah. The real scholar is the one who finds the link between present situations and Quran and Sunnah’s chapters.

Call to Islam and Not a Group or Person:
Call people to Islam. Do not attach yourself to any sub-group within Islam. The mainstream Islam is the Islam which was practiced by the companions of the Prophet –peace be upon him- and their students afterwards. The Islam was carried in it’s original form by those scholars from generation to generation. Great names like: Said ibnul Mussaieb, Al-hasan al-Basri, Sufyan ath-Thawri, Abu-Hanifa, Malik ibn Anas, az-Zuhri, al-Awjawe, Yaywa ibn Maeen, ash-Shafee, Ahmen ibn Hanbal, at-Tabari, abu Hatem ar-Rajee, ibn al-Arabee, An-Nawawee, Ibn Taimiah, Ibnul Qayyem, Ibn Katheer, ibn Hajar, Muhammad ibn-Abdul Wahhab, etc.

In this way Islamic knowledge moved from one generation to another. The problem happens when a group of people surround around a scholar or a book and choose a name for themselves and start to reject any knowledge other that what they think is right. In this way they reject instructions of Quran and hadeeth. Eventually, they start to think that among the Majority Muslims, only their group is on the right path and the rest are not.

Tawheed (Monotheism) First:
Whoever knows and understands the dawah life of our Prophet comes to the conclusion that Tawheed was the most important agenda of our Prophet. Throughout his life, he struggled hard to teach this ummah how to worship Allah properly. He showed that association of anything with Allah is Shirk and is the greatest sin. He closed all doors that might lead to Shirk, and opened and called for all doors that strengthens the concept of tawheed.

This is why, in the e-Dawah, first priority should be given to Tawheed, so that the mankind knows the rights of Allah, and how this right is violated through hundreds of ways.

War Between Two Parties:
According to Quran –and history- there are only two parties. Party of Allah and the Party of Satan. An eternal clash between the two parties existed, is existing and will exist. Party of Allah wins the battle at the end, but at certain point of time, party of Satan might have the upper hand. This upper hand is in terms of physical military power. But when it comes to meta-physical logics and ideology, then no logic, argument or proof can beat the logic and argument which the party of Allah has. But when the physical power is at the hand of Satan’s party, their ideology also gets promotion by force, but not by logic.

We are now at a time when the ideology of Satan is the upper hand, because the party of Satan is having a temporary supremacy on earth. That is the western secular civilization, with the ideology which is been established on a shaky ground of Greek philosophy and Satan mythology where divine religion is their greatest enemy and atheism is their pleasure, and philosophers are their prophets.

It is important thus in e-Dawah to stress on this point and show clearly the knowledge and logic that Islam has which suits the mankind and brings happiness to them, and also prove that the solutions which western civilization brought lead to more problems and do not give happiness to mankind.
 

Few Methods

It is a fact that Islam loving Muslims are individuals and not states or powerful organizations. If there were governments and countries behind preaching Islam, then the situation would have been much better. Nevertheless, Internet enables individuals to share their knowledge. In what follows I will try to mention some of the methods that individuals can easily contribute. The coming days will surely reveal more flexible techniques.

Blog

Blogs are becoming popular these days. It is a place where an individual makes his/her personal diary of opinions and ideas. He can share this place with others. Basically it is the easiest way a person has his own homepage. To get a flavor look at my blog. A good start might be by visiting blogger.com and registering for a blog. Then start publishing articles either by your self or from other sources with proper references. Then go to some blog directory like technorati or blogwise and submit your blog there, so others can read your blog. You may want to give a theme to your blog and have multiple blogs with different themes. For example, you may want to have a blog for Quran and start listing articles there related to the beauty of Quran or discussing some of the verses. Similarly you may want to have a different blog for hadeeth, etc.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia constructed by you, me and anyone who has access to Internet! It is a joint project done by the globe. But the bitter fact is that though we Muslims, represent a big proportion of world population, yet our presentation in cyberspace is only very marginal. Unfortunately, mostly non-Muslims are writing about our religion in Wikipedia. As a result the world is getting wrong information about our religion from media in general and wikipedia in particular.

Therefore, I suggest that you can proceed with 3 things: 1) To start gathering information on an Islamic topic which has no entry yet in Wikipedia and construct an article with authentic information with a high quality. Do not be emotional or aggressive. This will result in your article been deleted. 2) Go for existing articles on Islamic subjects, and read them carefully. It is very likely that you come across wrong information. Then press on [Edit] and correct the information in a very logical and scientific way without being emotional or aggressive. Try to maintain the logical flow of the article so a sequential reader will not feel a sudden turn in the style. 3) Search for topics which you know is wrong, for example the ideology of philosophers concerning God, day of judgment, angles, prophets, or the concept of Trinity in Christians, and modify these texts in a very logical way.

Discussion Groups

You will find so many discussions groups in the net. Yahoo and Google have their own. You can subscribe to a group or create your own. Through these discussion groups you will be able to reach to many people and have interaction with them through detailed post and reply way. This method is good to take a person and convince him after so many discussions to accept the right religion. It is very rare that you invite to a religion and the invitee accepts without clarifying so many queries in his mind. In this case blogs or websites might not serve the purpose where personal contact will be the best method.

Chat Rooms

Through chat rooms you may have direct interaction with many people. Here e-Dawah should work very fine provided that you have a good communication and convincing style. Chat rooms is a double sided sword if has it's danger side as well. No doubt that Islam has the greatest logic, but the person defending Islam might not be knowledgeable and this might have negative impact.

Websites

Building website is very effective in e-Dawah, but it requires a minimum skill sets both in technical side and Islamic knowledge and it requires some money as well.

Cautions

In Cyberspace you are in a virtual world. You do not see or know the persons with whom you are interacting. Being in a public space you can have no assumption on the nature of the visitor. So, that means you can not believe -from the first contact- everything the other person is saying. It is a well known fact that many cyber hunters caused so many trouble to so many people. So, be careful if someone shows willingness to accept Islam and asks to send him money.

Do not get addicted to Internet and particularly to Chat rooms. I know people who left their real world aside and spent tens of hours in virtual space, moving from one chat room to others. This has bad impact on health, and on mental status.

A Muslim is a balanced person. Everyone has a family, neighbors and friends. These are the people who should get the priority in Dawah. e-Dawah should be secondary priority after the actual physical dawah. It is strange that a Muslim has no effect whatsoever on his neighbors, yet he claims to be active in e-Dawah!

If you are seeking knowledge on Islam then you must know that as Judaism and Christianity, in Islam there are so many deviated sects. Some of those deviated groups have strong presentation in Cyberspace. If you are a naive and hooked in one of their sites, then you will come up with totally wrong information on Islam. Shia, Quadyania, Ahmediahh, Sufisim, etc all have their own sites and they claim to present Islam. So, Cyberspace is dangerous because of it's virtuality. I suggest that you search in your vicinity for practicing Muslims and get their opinion on websites that you frequently visit.

Conclusion

This article meant to raise an issue which is very important: e-Dawah. It was not the intention to give a comprehensive guideline on this matter. I hope this will initiate more researches to come up will a complete guideline and solution. The bottom-line is to give emphasis in promoting Quran and the traditions of our Prophet. When these two gets a considerable representation in WWW, then a change is ought to come.

---

Filter +3 Excellent+2 Insightful+1 Useful0 NeutralSee All-1 Off Topic-2 Flame-3 SPAMOldest FirstNewest First50 posts25 posts15 posts5 posts 

Write Comment
Please keep the topic of messages relevant to the subject of the article. Personal verbal attacks will be deleted. Please don't use comments to plug your web site.. Such material will be removed
Name:
Email:
Comment-Tracking E-mail Alerts
Mode		New entry [Start a new Entry]
Title:
BBCode:
Comment:

Powered by OpenComment 3.0.21