Old Concerns and New Challenge
The fact the many Muslims are interacting with each other as never before is bound to have major culture, political and commercial ramifications. So far, the Internet seems to mainly affect the elite segment in the Muslim world. The Muslim intellectual community in the Western world has the advantage to be the first to use and introduce Islamic inputs in this new medium of communication. Soon, the medium gained grounds among educational institutions, intellectuals, business entrepreneurs and government agencies in many parts of the Muslim world. Today, the new communication technology is already affecting the Muslim environment and it is increasingly becoming a new reality that is not only shaping the way the Muslims communicate with each other but the way they think and perceive the local and global worlds.
The apparent positive outcome of this instant two-way communication is that many Muslim can have communication and share knowledge and experience with no apparent restriction. This may lead later to the emergence of a new Muslim cyber community that is not only shaped by national considerations, but by the universal values of Islam. The Muslims can also have access to knowledge and information that were until recently beyond reach. The commercial Internet also may change the way the Muslim do business and may improve their economic efficiency.
This communication technology produces drawbacks that raise solemn cultural concerns in the Muslim context. The most important component of this is the presence of pornography, violence and other meaningless content which adversely affect the new vulnerable generation of Muslims. This concern is not actually new since the media of television and video have previously generated criticism and resistance by the Muslims and the non-Muslim alike on the same score. The new element of such new technology is the inability to exercise any form of supervision and control. On the societal level, it is not quite clear whether this medium will weaken the family and erode the role played so far by interpersonal communication and social network in the transmission of knowledge, culture and heritage. There seem to be various political implications too. This technology can improve access to government. Contrarily, the medium can be used to spread rumours and engage in ‘dis-information campaign’ against governments and institutions.
Recently a number of software and technical devices have been introduced to block incoming and outgoing unwanted material and guard against security breaches on the Internet. The basic function of this "firewall" is to intelligently isolate unwanted material. All traffic coming from the ‘outside’ of a firewall is constrained to pass through a single choke-point. Because it does so, the firewall has the opportunity to check that the data passage is acceptable – that is, it conforms to the criteria of the site. Similarly, a firewall ensures that outbound traffic is also non-threatening or that people within your organisation are not communicating with outside entities that you have chosen to disallow. Other blocking software such as Cyber Patrol, Cyber Sitter and Cyber Watch are developed to keep certain segment of end users, such as children, away from inappropriate sites on the Web.
Still censorship is becoming an important issue in the Muslim context. The old North South debate between advocates of free flow of information and promoters of balanced and guided system of communication has recently resurfaced. The political authorities find some kind of information objectionable. There is concern over the possible threat to moral values and traditions posed by the new medium of the Internet. The Internet provider in the United Arab Emirate, for example, is taking steps to censor Web sites that are deemed to violate moral standards. The perceptions about Islam and Muslims can now be restructured in such a way that a balanced and genuine representation may emerge in such a way that the Muslim master and extend their presence in this cyber world of communication.