Mahmood's Den

It’s so new the Arabic term was only coined recently. Tadween, or blogging, provides those living under authoritarian Arab regimes with freedom of expression. Will the minority influence the mainstream?

Blogging may be new in the Arab world, but it’s spreading rapidly. Although only 10 per cent of people in the Arab world have access to the internet the number has increased five-fold since 2000, according to Internet World Stats.

Speaking to the Washington Post, Haitham Sabbah, a Bahrain-based blogger and Middle East editor for Global Voices said: “Several years ago, Arabic blogs in the Middle East could be counted on one hand. Today they are in the thousands and are becoming a new source for news and information.”

In countries like Egypt, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, bloggers are using the Internet to expose stories the state-controlled media won’t report.

In Egypt during the recent Eid holiday a mob, some of whom were state security officials, went on a rampage of sexual assaults in downtown Cairo. The state-controlled media didn’t report on the issue for days, but it was forced onto the news agenda when the Associated Press and satellite channels picked up on blogs written by victims and witnesses.

Arab leaders fear the power of blogs

Regimes in the Arab region fear the power of blogs. Gulf Leaders are to hold a conference in the Saudi capital Riyadh in December to discuss ways of monitoring the Internet, which Abdullah al-Jadsir, an official at Saudi’s Ministry of Culture and Education described as dangerous.

Arab leaders find it so dangerous a number of bloggers have been arrested. At least six were imprisoned in Egypt earlier in the year, a country which Reporters Without Borders added to its list of states which are the worst suppressors of free speech on the internet. A number have also been arrested in Bahrain this year.

Salam Pax, the so-called Baghdad Blogger who was the first Arab blogger to achieve fame worldwide, said the arrests of Arab bloggers: “is the typical knee-jerk reaction of any totalitarian regime. Most of the time they don’t even really care what the content is as long as you have not been ‘approved’ you could get in trouble. So it was expected to happen at one point but what is great is that the others who were blogging kept on doing it even after the arrests.

“These governments are very paranoid about information and its availability and many of them try to keep what is going on inside their countries under a tightly screwed lid and bloggers around the Arab world have become a nuisance for many of those totalitarian governments.”

But he is very optimistic about the increase in bloggers in the Arab region and potential for change in the future. He said: “It is great. Once you open that door you can’t shut it very easily. The more voices that speak up the more difficult it will be to silence them.”

Blocking Mahmood’s Den

One example is that of a prominent Bahraini activist, Mahmood Al-Yousif’s blog, which was recently blocked inside Bahrain for discussing a case which was being heard in the courts regarding the allegation a British citizen, Dr Salah Al-Bandar, stole government documents.

Dr Bandar and his colleagues collected the documents which related to a government plan to exclude the majority Shi’a population from all public and private life and to ensure the ruling Sunni minority always had the upper hand.

The court hearing the case issued a banning order discussing it, but the Bahrain Ministry of Information interpreted this to mean anything to do with Bandargate, as it’s called.

Al-Yousif said the newspapers acquiesced to this order rather than expose the plan, shrinking from their public responsibility.

He added: “Bloggers were the first to step up to the plate and continue to talk about the scandal and discuss it, in spite of government attempts to shut us up.”

The Bahraini authorities blocked Mahmood’s Den, but within minutes his site was up and running on a different URL. And that’s the problem Arab regimes which hope to regulate the Internet face. It’s virtually impossible.

Mahmood’s Den was eventually unblocked in a face-saving measure by the Bahraini government after a campaign by fellow Arab bloggers.

But the episode has increased interest in blogging in Bahrain with new bloggers coming online.

Arab Bloggers, as the Mahmood’s Den episode has demonstrated, seek safety in numbers by generating negative publicity for the governments which try and silence them. And their confidence will likely grow with more successes and with that more bloggers.

The growing influence of the Arab blog

Martin Asser, an online journalist at the BBC, said: “How important have blogs and bloggers become in fuelling social and political change? Well, it hasn’t happened yet, mostly the bloggers are still voices outside of the mainstream – and we are talking about the Arab world here, where popular participation in the political process in most countries is the exception. But their influence is increasing.

“Indeed, judging by the way bloggers are being targeted for arrest and censorship in some of those countries, the authorities are clearly aware of the effect that they could have.”

By Gillian Bell :: JOMEC Online Journalism – posted on Dec 15th, 2006.